Marshall and Warren’s research contributed to an important theme in modern medicine: that bacteria and viruses cause more diseases than we would think. It is now known that cervical cancer is caused by the contagious human papillomavirus, or HPV. Certain types of heart disease have been linked to cytomegalovirus, a common virus that infects about two thirds of the population.

In the fall of 2005, Marshall and Warren received the Nobel Prize in medicine for their work. These two men had a brilliant, Nobel-worthy, world-changing insight. So why did Marshall have to poison himself to get people to believe him?

A paradox seems to have arisen in that the high accord attached to the self appears to be associated with an increase in misery and insecurity, if the relatively recent increase in self-harm, depression and suicide among young people may be considered indicators of this disturbing trend.

Then the 2008 financial crisis happened, followed by a long period of recession and austerity, and suddenly it turned out that the technocratic consensus wasn’t as competent or moderate as it had appeared. Ten to twenty per cent of the electorate suddenly realized that they might have to take an interest in politics after all. So they started paying attention again, and they didn’t have the basic assumptions of the mainstream. All they knew was that the people who used to be in charge seemed to have screwed things up mightily.

You can’t say how much information a human being is taking in and reacting to at any given time, but you can easily observe the difference between a human being that is coping and one that is overloaded. That’s my diagnosis of what led to the series of connected political eruptions between the financial crisis and the pandemic. The hypothesis set out as early as 1970 by Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shock turned out to be correct: the number of people who were no longer able to cope with the modern world reached a critical mass.

Marmot ended up concluding that the psychic feeling of being in control of your life is extremely important as a source of well-being, and that conversely, being out of control is physiologically harmful as wells s emotionally intolerable.

At various points in this book, we’ve noted that you can tell when a cybernetic system is overloaded because it breaks down. Marmot’s main conclusion from his research was that inequality in society was a major driver of public health risks, but it could be givens cybernetic interpretation too. The connection that he found looks like the result of a variety mismatch; people are, increasingly, unable to regulate the input from their immediate environment, and they correctly perceive this as a threat to health and life.