"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep" - Saul Bellow
"Proof" is not always found in the pieces, but in the pattern of pieces. I just read an article about Kasparov taking on another Deep Blue chess program. He said that while a computer can add moves together quantitatively, and may even outlast the body inducing fatigue and error, the processing of the mind in chess also involves a "looking ahead at patterns".
This "looking ahead" involves not just a strict probability analysis involving the accumulation of data, but an intuiting of which pattern is the most effective. When I was a trial attorney, I used to tell jurors that the truth was not found only in the pieces of evidence, but in how they are put together, and further, how they feel about that pattern in their gut. If you are going to invoke evidentiary language, know that in this country the truth, at least theoretically (as in, what the law says, because I don't think our justice system is set up to find truth, but to maintain order) is found both in the isolated facts and in how the person responds to them (i.e. a lack of bias does not imply an exclusive focusing on "objective" criteria, only that subjective opinions be reasonable. People who are scientifically materialist in orientation tend to assume that all reason is exclusively objective and a product of accumulation of data, which, not coincidentally, is what science assumes).
Question: Do you really believe that $150,000/yr advertising contracts do not have an effect - a discernible effect - upon the "objective" opinions of those employers and their employed? I know that we want to believe that yellow ribbons and a hundred points of light are real, and that protecting an oil port for ourselves while maintaining a monarchy is really a fight for democracy, or for "freedom fighters", or for whatever is our next delusion, but sometimes it is not true and, in fact, the King has no clothes. The question, then, is whether the King is doing it TO you, or below that, he is just a symptom of your own willingness to believe in what he says - because you are orientated to look to others to tell you what to believe - and ignore what is in the patterns. It is an ignor-ing (the root of ignorance) that seeks to believe in the surface so one does not have to see the pain underneath, which would cause one to change.
There are many wonderful people in the hiend "industry" who love music and see stereos as instruments of the soul and don't want to just make money off you - and there is nothing wrong with receiving value for value done. But there is a large proportion of this microcosm - almost as if it has been concentrated like acid - who are borderline narcissistic, histrionic, catty, vindictive, dishonest and petty. This group of people are embedded and exert a determitive influence on the hiend.
When you look into the hiend from the outside it appears one way because it is dynamically set up to appear opaque; when you are on the inside, you see the way it is, and the severity of the affliction.
My advice is to love your music and your system and gleen what truth you see from magazines, but, in the end, follow what Brucegel says. It is evidence born of experience.
"We don't err because the truth is difficult to see, we err for comfortability." - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
