The Missing Link

Thank you, Diana, for finally giving me the missing piece of the puzzle. In his book "Blink" Malcom Gladwell talks about rapid cognition; the way a person's subconscious will pick up certain clues based on that person's life experience (e.g. formal schooling, information acquired from exposure to different circumstances, et al) and feed a conclusion to the conscious mind. Often mistaken for revelation or instinctual knowledge, it is a person's reticular activating system identifying what is important in solving a particular problem and channelling the solution to the conscious mind, sometimes in the manner of "just a feeling."

I had "a feeling" about "third parties" and how they were ineffective where they weren't downright harmful, but I could never rationally explain why I had that feeling until Diana placed the above referenced post on an Objectivism Online forum. The comparison to the abolitionist movement was especially telling. It's always nice to have a historical example. I'd like to make the comparison, since we're in a war of ideas, to asymmetric warfare. When facing an enemy of great strength, never gather all in one place where you can be effectively wiped out; or in this case, summarily ignored in toto.

~Adam