How Google's Algorithm Revealed I'd Been Resisting Manipulation Without Knowing It.
Or: What Aldous Huxley warned about in 1958 and why pattern recognition beats emotional capture. 5-minute read | By John Langley (The Almighty Gob) | 19 December 2025
So I spent yesterday evening thinking about everything I’ve written this past year. The patterns in institutional manipulation. How emotional triggers replace rational analysis. The techniques that make people choose servitude over questioning.
Trying to join the dots. Work out the common threads. How to make it coherent.
Couldn’t quite get there.
Then later—middle of the night, phone quiet, nobody knocking—I’m doing what I always do. Working. Writing. When my best thinking happens.
Stillness. Silence. Solitude.
The three S’s, I call them. The conditions most people never create anymore because we’re overloaded with information 24/7. It comes from every direction. The only time most people experience stillness, silence, and solitude is when they’re asleep—when the brain processes anyway.
But you need to practice it outside that sleep pattern. Take those valuable few hours or minutes to actually clear your mind. Let patterns emerge without the noise.
That’s when I work best.
I pick up my phone for a break.
There’s Google. Serving me, Aldous Huxley and Brave New World Revisited.
Right.
The timing made me stop and think.
Because here’s Huxley in 1958, warning about psychological manipulation replacing rational thought.
And here’s me in 2025, documenting exactly that without realising someone else spotted the pattern 67 years ago.
Think about that.
The Bloke Who Never Plans Anything.
Most people plan their lives. Careers. Finances. Holidays. Pensions. Five-year strategies.
I don’t. Never have.
Random collisions and “seemed like a good idea at the time.” Circumstances pile up. I extract what I need. Move on.
Never planned a career. Never planned where I’d end up. Never planned friendships—people came and went, taught me things, then the jigsaw piece got filed away.
The only thing I’ve ever planned was my autobiography. And even that was just organising randomness that had already happened.
Which is what’s happening now with this Huxley thing.
I wasn’t planning to write about manipulation. I was thinking about patterns. Then Google serves me someone who noticed similar things 67 years ago.
Different backgrounds. Different methods. Occasionally similar observations.
Here we are.
What Huxley Actually Warned About.
Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932—the dystopian novel everyone thinks they know.
In 1958, he wrote Brave New World Revisited. Not fiction. Analysis. Looking at how his warnings were coming true.
His warning wasn’t about boots stamping on faces. That was Orwell.
Huxley warned about something more subtle.
We wouldn’t need to be oppressed. We’d choose our servitude. Love it.
“Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.”
Churchill’s “few” saved a nation through courage. Huxley’s “few” subdue nations through psychological engineering.
Soft control. Making people want what serves power.
And here’s where it connected.
Democracy requires rational thought, Huxley argued. Decisions based on facts. Logic.
But emotions bypass reason. Fear and desire make common sense feel exhausting.
So manipulators use “Non-Rational Propaganda.” Triggers that make you feel before you think.
Sound familiar?
You see it everywhere.
The Techniques (Or: How It Works).
Huxley identified specific manipulation techniques in 1958. Here’s 2025.
Glittering Generalities: Virtue words that bypass thinking.
“Community.” “Diversity.” “Climate action.” “Social justice.”
Automatic agreement. Nobody examines whether the policy serves the value. The word does the work.
Council homes sold? “Strategic asset management.” Traffic chaos? “Liveable neighbourhoods.” Bristol’s Green administration has perfected this technique - every governance failure wrapped in progressive language that makes questioning feel dangerous.
The words sound good. That’s the point.
Name-Calling: Bad labels that stop listening.
“Far-right.” “Transphobic.” “Climate denier.” “Islamophobe.”
Label lands, engagement stops.
Emergency vehicles can’t access new schemes? You’re anti-climate. Question how contested definitions get adopted without scrutiny? You’re the bigot.
The label short-circuits questions before anyone answers them.
Are you getting this?
Digital Soma: The feed as a narcotic.
Huxley predicted this in 1958 without knowing smartphones. Not the technology—the mechanism.
Endless distraction. Instant gratification. Drowns substance in noise.
Truth requires effort. The feed requires nothing.
Five thousand words with citations versus thirty-second outrage clips.
Which one wins?
The irony being: writing about how Digital Soma destroys attention spans while trying to hold attention long enough to explain it.
That’s not an accident. It’s the system working as designed.
Think about that.
The Accidental Observer.
Right. Back to that precisely timed Google notification.
I never studied Huxley academically. Left school at 15. Bugger all qualifications.
Everything I know came from the Jigsaw Method—extracting knowledge from random experiences, filing it away, moving on.
But here’s what struck me about Huxley’s warnings.
I’ve been doing what he advocated. By accident. By necessity.
Mental Hygiene, Huxley called it.
Spotting emotional triggers before they bypass reason. Recognising when virtue words do the thinking. Refusing pre-packaged conclusions.
That’s my entire approach. Three questions:
Is it practical?
Is it logical?
What’s the likely outcome?
Not “how does it make me feel?” Not “which tribe does it serve?”
Does it work? Does it make sense? What happens next?
Huxley called that Mental Hygiene.
I call it not being a mug.
Same thing.
You see it?
Pattern Recognition From The Edge.
I don’t follow typical patterns. Not better or worse. Different.
Never had a conventional career to defend. Never built tribal loyalties needing protection. Never invested enough in any system to care when it fails.
I watch. From the edge, not the middle.
You don’t stand in the middle of a football pitch to watch a match. You stand at the side where you can see what’s happening.
My neurodivergent wiring means emotions don’t hit the same way they do for most people. I feel them—not some emotionless robot—but they’re muted. Reserved. Kept at a distance.
Which probably sounds cold. It’s just different wiring.
And useful.
When strong emotion hits, most people’s pattern recognition drowns. Passion overwhelms observation. Fear clouds clarity.
For me, the patterns keep staying visible.
The algorithm spotted that pattern in my writing before I consciously made the connection.
Unsettling? Maybe. Or just how pattern-matching technology works when you’ve been documenting the same themes long enough.
Probably both.
The Country of the Insane.
Here’s Huxley’s ultimate fear.
Not that we’d be lied to. That we’d become so distracted and emotionally manipulated that we’d stop caring what the truth was.
That’s where we are.
The rational person asking practical questions becomes the outlier. The problem.
Ask whether a protest strategy will achieve its goal. You lack compassion.
Question whether adopting contested definitions without scrutiny serves those it claims to protect? You’re the bigot.
Point out that policies need to work in practice, not just sound good in principle. You’re heartless.
Common Sentiment replaced Common Sense.
Anyone insisting on rationality—the bit Huxley said democracy requires—gets pushed to the margins.
Not through force. Through moral pressure. Through virtue words and name-calling. Through exhaustion of constantly defending basic questions against waves of emotional certainty.
Easier to go along. Feel what you’re supposed to feel. Signal the right loyalty.
That’s not oppression in the traditional sense.
That’s exactly what Huxley warned about.
Loving your servitude because questioning it feels too costly.
You see it, right?
The Accidental Vindication.
Here’s what struck me reading Huxley’s warnings.
I’m not special. Didn’t discover anything new. Just a bloke who left school at 15 and has been navigating random chaos since.
What I did was survive circumstances that forced me to develop resistance to exactly the manipulation Huxley described.
Neurodivergent wiring keeping emotions muted. Life experience preventing tribal capture. Pattern recognition that kept working when everyone else’s drowned in sentiment.
None of it planned. All accidental.
Decades later, I’m documenting in real-time what a Cambridge-educated genius predicted would happen.
That’s not vindication of me. That’s vindication of the framework.
If some random school leaver can independently develop the same resistance mechanisms through lived chaos, the framework isn’t exclusive to intellectuals.
It’s available to anyone willing to pay attention, ask questions, and refuse emotional capture.
You don’t need degrees. You need discipline.
You don’t need credentials. You need courage to ask awkward questions.
You don’t need authority. You need autonomy—that inner sovereignty that survives when systems fail.
Mental Hygiene, Huxley called it.
Not being a mug, I call it.
Same thing.
Think about that.
Final Thought.
That Google notification wasn’t magic.
Pattern recognition meeting confirmation.
I’d already assembled what Huxley articulated. The algorithm just pointed out I’d been walking the path without knowing its name.
And honestly? That’s more reassuring than if I’d read Huxley first and tried to apply his framework.
Because it means the framework emerges naturally from paying attention to reality. From asking practical questions. From refusing to let sentiment override sense.
You don’t need to read Huxley to resist what he warned about.
You just need to stop letting people manipulate your emotions. Stop accepting virtue words as a substitute for thinking. Stop surrendering your sovereignty to whatever tribe promises belonging.
Easy to say. Exhausting to do.
But necessary.
Because someone has to stay rational when Common Sentiment replaces Common Sense.
Someone has to keep asking: Is it practical? Is it logical? What’s the likely outcome?
Someone has to maintain that observer position—watching from the edge where patterns stay visible even when everyone in the middle is drowning in emotion.
Might as well be us.
Right?
Sources & Further Reading:
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958) - Harper & Brothers
Winston Churchill, “Never was so much owed by so many to so few” (1940) - Referenced by Huxley
Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil (1977) - The Anarch concept
Related Almighty Gob Articles:
Bristol Council’s housing contradictions: 1,222 homes sold vs 1,000 promised
The Islamophobia definition: How contested terms capture institutions
East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhoods: When emergency access becomes political theatre
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