Often an author's main contentions, premises or lines of argument are laid down in the introductory pages which include any prefaces, forewords or introductions. Neil Postman ably displays this feature in his famous work: Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) In the Foreword of his prophetic analysis of present-day Western society, Postman contrasts the famous novel 1984 by George Orwell (1949) with Brave New World (BNW: 1932) by Alduous Huxley. Both these novels are about controlling the masses: in 1984 it is done by pain, but in BNW by pleasure. Postman believed that BNW had got it right. According to Postman, people won't need Orwell's totalitarian 'Big Brother ' to keep them in line; rather they 'will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think' (p. vii) as in Huxley's BNW . In Orwell's nightmarish 1984 the truth is hidden by adapting it to fit ...
we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen --Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles