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A Different Kind of Objectivist Romance I just watched a video of a presentation by a self-proclaimed Objectivist. He and his wife separated, so he talked for over an hour-and-a-half about how she is a psychopath. Not a figurative psychopath. And evil literal one. I don't know anything about this person (Anthony Dream Johnson) or his company (21 University), but what I gather, his main work is to offer dating advice to men. His beef with his ex-wife (Marilee Johnson) is that she had been cheating on him from the start of their marriage and had even been doing escort prostitution work on the side. The really embarrassing part for him is that she was one of the celebrities of his company, giving presentations, interviews, etc. And, of course, they held themselves as an example of the perfect couple to his customers. I don't want to make light of what Anthony Johnson went through, though, because he was obviously hurt and hurt bad. I have been through the experience of being in love with a woman who constantly cheated on me without me knowing about it until the end. So, yeah, it's devastating. But, from this presentation, we only get his side of the story. I say that because, from my experience, there are two sides to a story like this. What makes this relevant to Objectivism is that he publicly declared that Objectivism helped him through the darkness. He put up a picture of him and his ex sitting on a couch with Nathaniel Branden and he put up several quotes by Ayn Rand during the talk and riffed off them. (No snide comments about the wisdom of getting dating advice from the wrong philosophy, puhleaze... ) I'm a bit ambivalent about how he claims to have handled his marriage. If what he said about his ex is true (and on first blush, my gut tells me it probably is), obviously she went into the marriage with horrible intent. More than that, he has a super-legitimate concern about her sleeping with countless random men without a condom, then sleeping with him, sometimes on the same day as he tells it. But laying down a lot of rules and "deal-breaker" negotiations right from the start (like he said he did) just doesn't appear to me as the best approach to romance. To speculate from the subtexts I perceived (which, admittedly, is subjective on my part), I got the idea she wanted a knight in shining armor and got an opinionated CEO of an accountant firm trying to mold himself into a fiction character instead. But he's not a loser. It seems like his company is doing quite well. Just from looking at his YouTube channel, he has worked with a lot of famous people. All men, though. (Frankly, if I were a secret nymphomaniac, I would go where good looking but sexually insecure men who exercise a lot hang out and it looks to me like she did precisely that. What's more, she hit the motherlode. She apparently slept with several--or many--of them.) I have one main criticism of Anthony Johnson. Like a good Objectivist, after she hurt him, his response was to relegate her to subhuman status--it's not that she is a bitch. It's that she cannot feel normal human emotions, so she tries to suck these emotions out of those who can feel and destroy them based on the hatred she wallows in. (This is an extrapolation of Rand's "hatred of the good for being the good" more than a true psychological diagnosis of psychopathy, but there it is.) At the very end, Anthony Johnson made a call to identify psychopaths like his ex and breed them out of the human race by refusing to sleep with them. According to him, they do not breed among themselves because they can't stand their own kind. So they will eventually die off and be eliminated from the human gene pool if the good people do not mix their DNA with them. To prove he's rational, he acknowledged that this is a long-term project. I don't know... Dayaamm! Seriously, though, I feel for Anthony Johnson. A person who is hurt but, like he says, believes a blow job from his ex is meaningless and fundamentally different than having full normal copulation--so he did this several times during the breakup, is confused. I don't blame him for having sex with his ex during emotional turmoil. I do find his re-defining sex the way he did symptomatic of too many folks I have known in O-Land. That means I would probably feel for his ex if I learned more about her from her side, too. (I actually did look up a couple of videos of her interviewing people on his website. Go here and scroll down to videos three years ago, for instance. Or here is a direct link to one of them--24k views. I didn't get much of an impression of her either way, though. Not very charismatic.) So there it is. If you want to visit a different corner in the Objectivist subcommunity, I certainly found an interesting one to look at. Enjoy, if you will... At the very least, it's food for thought. Michael