A state with an autoimmune disease

In this piece I use the metaphor of an autoimmune disease to describe our state. It is an image that imposes itself when you look soberly at what our defensive structures — legislation, bureaucracy, control mechanisms — have come to do to the healthy tissue they were originally meant to protect.

What a healthy body does

In a healthy body, T cells recognise accurately what is foreign and what is its own, what is dangerous and what ought to be cherished. When an immune response threatens to go out of control, regulatory cells intervene to slow it down, so that the attack remains confined to what is genuinely harmful. The cells that carry — that produce, that share, that sustain the body — are thus left in peace.

It is a delicate balance, and like every balance it is vulnerable.

What happens when that balance is lost

In a sick body that recognition becomes disturbed. The immune system begins to turn against its own cells — precisely those cells that are needed for life and production. The brake that normally halts a runaway immune response is weakened or absent. What began as protection thus becomes a slowly disruptive process.

The body does not do this out of ill will. It simply no longer recognises itself properly.

Our institutions, seen in this light

The farmer experiences it. The family business experiences it. The inventor, the self-employed, the factory that still makes something — they feel how the system, unwittingly, undermines their position. Not through one law, one measure, one decision, but through an accumulation of regulation that turns out to bear down above all on them.

Not an indictment — a diagnosis

This is expressly not a moral indictment of individual civil servants or politicians. The people who carry this system often do their best and mean well. The problem lies not in the persons, but in the signalling between them — and in what is absent.

What is absent, in this metaphor, are the regulatory T cells of the system. Read: accountable leadership that genuinely bears the consequences of its decisions, corrective counter-power that functions, personal liability that still reaches ten years later. When those brakes weaken, the attack on healthy cells can continue unnoticed, even when nobody wants that.

What the metaphor opens up

The value of this image lies not in its sharpness, but in the treatment it brings into view. Anyone who sees a state as a body with a runaway immune response knows what is needed to make it healthy again: not to strike harder at the system, but to restore the regulatory functions.

That happens in three ways simultaneously. By restructuring the command structure so that those who decide also feel the consequences. By making the counter-power — judicial, journalistic, parliamentary — genuinely workable. And by recalibrating the incentives, so that the law protects what sustains society rather than what hollows it out.

The two articles that follow are the application of this image to Brussels: how three simultaneously acting measures — CBAM, ETS and Pillar Two — affect the European productive tissue, and how that same dynamic becomes visible across six sectors at once. Read them in that order, with this metaphor in mind, and the figures will find their place.