When the Orwellian 1984 arrived, said Neil Postman, people breathed a sigh of relief thinking all is well because we were not oppressed by any 'Big Brother'. But, the earlier prophetic voice of Aldous Huxley had argued in Brave New World (1932) that people would finally choose to be anaesthetised rather than face reality. And, one of our great modern methods of anaesthetising ourselves against reality is entertainment or in Blaise Pascal's word, diversions. For Pascal, diversions were one way mankind avoids thinking about the reality facing it at death. And the most pervasive entertainment diversion of this age is television. Neil Postman said in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) , It is my object in the rest of this book to make the epistemology of television visible again. I will try to demonstrate by concrete example ... that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality ... and that television speaks in only one persistent voice — the voice of...
we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen --Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles