Cults Of Unreason

Please forgive me for venturing out of The Padded Cell, but as a long time lurker and occasional meaningless contributor I couldn’t help but comment on some of the ideas that surface on hi-fi forums from time to time.

One of the cornerstones of any good cult is the ability to turn opinion, theory or half-truth into fact. Any decent hair-brained pseudo-religion can defend their gormless ideas with a few simple counter arguments. For example:

Cultist: The spirits of the dead fly to Jupiter and live lives of tranquil bliss in the methane layer of the atmosphere
Unbeliever: This is plainly cobblers and I’m thinking of calling the police
Cultist: Prove that it isn’t so
Unbeliever: Errr

Or:

Cultist: We are all evolved from rocks
Unbeliever: Interesting theory, what about all those fossil records?
Cultist: All fabricated by the global conspiracy of Master Bakers, who don’t want us to know the truth
Unbeliever: Hmmm, I always thought my Nan had a bit of igneous in her

Or even:

Cultist: All electricity is created from the collective output of the human orgasm
Unbeliever: Wibble
Cultist: You may scoff, but when you rise to a sufficiently high level in the organisation you will be shown the evidence. Until then you must believe, or me and my burly friend here will throw you out on the street with a large firework stuffed up your bottom. Then we’ll ostracise you and your loved ones!
Unbeliever: You win, how much do I have to pay?

But more tellingly:

Cultist: You’d call yourself an open-minded person, wouldn’t you?
Unbeliever: Of course
Cultist: You don’t believe that we’ve discovered all there is to know about everything, do you?
Unbeliever: Certainly not
Cultist: Then like every right-thinking person, you believe that there’s far more going on than “science” as we know it can explain, don’t you?
Unbeliever: I should co-co
Cultist: <gotcha>

There are many other non-arguments here including the ever popular: “My mate’s brother’s seen one so it must be true”, or: “2+2 = 4, agreed? So 2+3= 99”, but you get the drift.

So, eventually to the point of all this -

6 months run-in for kit? A classic case of the 2+2 argument. Yes I dimly remember my 72/Hiicap/250 getting better over a couple of weeks, but 6 months? Give me strength.

My speakers got no bass. Ah well, you haven’t thrown enough watts (money) at it.

Talking of worshipping at the altar of wattage, am I alone in wondering if the next step in history repeating itself will be for people to start talking in lascivious terms of how many watts their speakers can handle, or the size of their woofers? Or buying Sweet and Mud records?

How about the : “I haven’t heard the new kit and I have no intention of doing so, but I KNOW that its not for me” brigade?

Don’t even get me started on the appalling pseudo-science that surrounds stands. The cultism and the associated mentality is so blatantly just a substitute for joining The Scientologists, that I’m almost embarrassed to mention it.

Is this a recent thing here that some people believe that if they keep saying some utter bollocks often enough it’ll become accepted fact?

There are probably other examples that, caught up in my rant as I am, I can’t recall just now.

Walter