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Notes -
Picasso said it most plainly as "Art is a lie that makes us realise the truth."
Insofar as we're talking of an actual exploration of the human condition and not mere propaganda, there are things art can teach you that no exhaustive study is able to touch.
I like to use the 1995 film Hackers as a good example of this. Widely panned by IT professionals as the epitome of "hollywood hacking", it nevertheless is a cult film among those same IT professionals because it managed to capture the essential experience of being part of a specific community at a specific time.
Every CS grad worth his salt had made fun of the 3D Vitruvian Man viruses and associated iconography. But when ThePirateBay was fighting the Man, it's clips from this movie they would post on their website. Because despite their catastrophic failure to be specifically accurate Hollywood still got the human experience right. And that's what art is uniquely good at capturing anyways.
All this however is besides the point, because what I'm saying (and you seem to agree) is that being a truth seeking person is not normal. And perhaps ultimately not even possible in extremis.
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