Part 1: Why the Hard Cases Become Battlegrounds

This fall, two cases have taken over public argument. In Massachusetts, a jury could not agree whether Lindsay Clancy, who strangled her three young children while suffering what her defense called postpartum psychosis, should be held criminally responsible. Eleven jurors said no. One said yes. The judge declared a mistrial. At Cornell, an accusation against seven young men became a national story, and then a contested one, when the local prosecutor said the woman’s first sworn statement differed substantially from the version that spread online.

Neither case is settled, and I’m not going to argue about what happened in either. I want to ask a different question. Why do some cases become national battlegrounds, while others, often far worse, are reported and forgotten within a week?

Three ideas to start with

People live inside two moral systems, and each is right in its own place.

The Family Archetype is how a family thinks. It protects the vulnerable, gives according to need rather than merit, favors its own, and acts on care before proof. A mother doesn’t ask for evidence before comforting a crying child. In a family, that’s exactly right.

The Society Archetype is how public life among strangers has to work. It relies on fair procedures, evidence before judgment, and holding individuals responsible for what they actually did, not for the group they belong to. A court doesn’t comfort the accuser before establishing the facts. In public life, that’s exactly right.

Matrisensus is what happens when the family’s way of thinking takes over public life. It treats whole groups as victims or villains, rather than judging what particular people did. It keeps the people it sees as vulnerable innocent by placing the guilt elsewhere. It speaks the language of compassion, but it works like a verdict.

It isn’t outrage. It’s ambiguity.

The usual explanation for viral controversies is that outrage gets clicks. But that doesn’t fit the pattern. The clearest, most one-sided cases of wrongdoing rarely become lasting flashpoints. Everyone agrees what happened, and the story fades. The cases that never go away are the ones whose meaning stays open.

Sometimes that’s because the facts are disputed. But often the facts are agreed, and what’s disputed is what they mean. A case with one obvious reading gets absorbed. A case with two live readings can be argued forever.

Psychologists showed why in a classic 1979 study. Charles Lord, Lee Ross and Mark Lepper gave people on opposite sides of an issue the same mixed evidence. Neither side moved toward the other. Both became more certain they were right, because evidence that doesn’t settle its own meaning leaves room for everyone to read it their way.

So the real fight in these cases isn’t usually about the people involved. It’s about a rule. Matrisensus says: believe the designated victim, condemn the designated villain. The question is whether that rule is absolute, or only a starting assumption that has to give way when the evidence goes the other way. A clear case never tests that question, because both moral systems reach the same answer. An ambiguous case is the only place it can be fought out in public. That’s why both sides mobilize so completely. If the rule bends here, it was never absolute. If evidence doesn’t govern here, it doesn’t govern anywhere.

This is an old fight

Social media didn’t start this. It just made it faster.

In 1991, Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. No witness could settle what happened. But even certainty about the facts wouldn’t have settled the deeper question: should an uncorroborated accusation block a confirmation, or does fairness require more? The Senate confirmed him 52 to 48, the closest margin in over a century. Hill is still asked to relitigate it more than thirty years later. Clear cases don’t do that to their witnesses.

In 1998, the facts of Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky were agreed almost immediately. The two-year fight that followed, including an impeachment, was entirely about meaning: was this an abuse of power over a young subordinate, or a private matter? And the sides lined up largely by political loyalty, which shows how often people choose their principle based on the outcome they want.

The pattern ran on through the Duke lacrosse case, the Rolling Stone story about the University of Virginia, the Kavanaugh hearings, and the Covington Catholic incident.

The two current cases

Clancy’s own defense never denied that she killed her children. Her case rested on insanity. Investigators had ruled out her husband, Patrick, with surveillance footage and phone records. Even so, a loud online group insisted that Patrick was the real killer, contradicting the evidence and her own lawyers. That goes beyond arguing about meaning. It refuses to accept facts that are settled, because the only acceptable conclusion is her total innocence. Most of her supporters didn’t go that far; the real legal question, whether her mental state removed criminal responsibility, was genuinely hard. But the fringe shows where the rule leads when it’s held as absolute. It ignores not only uncertain facts, but certain ones.

The Cornell case is different: there, a real factual dispute remains open.

A culture that had settled which moral system governs public judgment wouldn’t need to fight this battle every few years. That we do, reliably, since at least 1991, tells us the question is still open.

One last idea

Underneath all of this is a simple principle about feeling. The feeling that something is wrong is real and valuable. It tells us where to look and what matters. But it is true testimony about the person who feels it, not proof about the world. “I feel harmed” is a fact. “So you harmed me” is a separate question. Feeling deserves the first word. It shouldn’t have the last.

Next: Part 2 asks whether juries can still do their job.

David Shackleton

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David Shackleton is a writer and cultural commentator whose work focuses on identity politics and gender. His books, Matrisensus, The Hand That Rocks the World: An Inquiry Into Truth, Power and Gender, and Daughters of Feminism: Women Supporting Men’s Equality, are available on Amazon. His website is genderhealing.com.

The Lover Within

Robert Moore and the Courage to Be Fully Alive

Of Robert Moore’s four masculine archetypes, the Lover may be the easiest to reduce to something smaller than it is.

We hear the word lover and think of romance or sex. Those certainly belong to the Lover, but Moore was speaking about something much larger. The Lover is the part of us that responds to beauty, music, touch, food, poetry, friendship, nature, grief, sexuality, creativity, and the sheer strangeness of being alive.

It is the capacity to experience the world not merely as useful, dangerous, or understandable, but as valuable.

The King asks, “How shall I care for this?” The Warrior asks, “What must I do?” The Magician asks, “What does this mean?” The Lover says, “Look at this. Feel this. This matters.”

Moore’s central insight might be put this way:

The Lover is not simply the part of us that falls in love. It is the part that experiences anything as worth loving.

Without the Lover, we may remain productive, responsible, disciplined, and intelligent. We can work, lead, analyze, and endure. But something essential begins to disappear. The world loses its color. Other people become functions. Work becomes obligation. Nature becomes a resource. Intimacy becomes another task to perform.

We are still alive, but we no longer feel fully alive.

The Garden

Moore associated each archetype with a different psychic space. The traditional space of the Lover is the garden.

The garden is not the battlefield, workshop, throne room, office, or classroom. It operates according to another kind of time. The Warrior has a mission and checks the clock. The Magician analyzes what is happening. The King remains responsible for the realm. But the Lover enters a place where nothing must immediately be accomplished.

Moore said simply, “The Lover has time.”

That is a radical statement in a culture organized around production. In the garden, we are not earning, fixing, competing, proving, or even helping. We are present. We taste the food. We hear the music. We notice the face across from us. We allow experience to reach us before deciding what to do with it.

This is why Moore said the Lover is about being rather than doing.

The garden includes sexuality, but it is larger than sexuality. It includes conversation that no one wants to end, working with wood because the grain is beautiful, feeling the soil in one’s hands, hearing a song that opens something inside, grieving someone we loved, laughing until we cannot breathe, or standing before a landscape that makes us quiet.

Eden is a garden, but so is Gethsemane. The Lover does not open us only to pleasure. It opens us to sorrow, longing, betrayal, tenderness, beauty, mortality, and loss. A man who refuses grief because it hurts has not conquered the Lover. He has closed the gate to the same garden in which joy lives.

 

Appreciative Consciousness

Moore called the Lover’s way of seeing “appreciative consciousness.”

The phrase is important. The Lover does not first approach the world by criticizing, measuring, diagnosing, or deciding how it can be used. It appreciates. That does not mean abandoning judgment. It means allowing value to appear before dissection begins.

Moore observed that the King blesses what he encounters, the Warrior fights it, and the Magician interprets it. The Lover appreciates it.

That form of consciousness can make the world seem luminous. William Blake, Walt Whitman, D. H. Lawrence, and Robert Bly all knew something about it. They could look at an ordinary object, an animal, a human body, or a patch of earth and experience more life than most of us notice.

Moore suggested a simple diagnostic question: How much of the time are you bored?

Boredom can occur even in a frantic life. In fact, Moore pointed out that a person can be both a workaholic and deeply bored. He may be constantly occupied while rarely touched by what he is doing.

The absence of boredom does not require continual entertainment. It comes from the ability to notice. A healed Lover finds more of the world interesting because more of the world is allowed to matter.

The Man Who Cannot Feel—and the Man Who Cannot Stop

Moore repeatedly described two broad Lover problems.

At one pole is the man who appears to have too little Lover energy. He feels wooden, detached, ashamed of his body, frightened by enthusiasm, uncomfortable with beauty, or incapable of resting. He may work continuously, analyze everything, or treat intimacy as another technical problem to solve.

Moore joked about the Warrior who approaches lovemaking like a train making a brief station stop. He is still on the mission. He may even read the manual and learn the proper technique, but he has not entered the garden.

This man may say that there is nothing passionate inside him. Moore thought the opposite was often true. Deadness may be a defense against passion so strong that the man fears it will overwhelm him. He is not empty. He is frightened of what might happen if the door opens.

At the other pole is the man who cannot close the door. He becomes flooded by appetite, infatuation, substances, sex, food, excitement, creativity, or risk. He cannot stop because no experience is ever enough to provide the union he seeks.

Moore used a country-song line to describe it: “Whoever turns you on forgot to turn you off.”

One man cannot feel. The other cannot stop. Both have difficulty maintaining a conscious relationship with the same energy.

For Moore, maturity was neither passionlessness nor permanent ecstasy. It was the growing ability to experience intensity without fleeing it, immediately discharging it, or being consumed by it. He described part of the therapeutic task as helping people learn to “stand their excitement longer.”

That is one of the most useful ideas in these lectures. Many of us have been taught how to suppress excitement or act upon it. Far fewer have learned how to remain present while it moves through us.

Shame and the Fear of Being Seen

Shame is one of the principal forces separating men from the Lover.

Men are often permitted to be useful, strong, successful, or funny. Being beautiful is more difficult. So is dancing without self-consciousness, dressing with flair, giving another man a poem, showing delight, or allowing the body to be seen without apology.

Moore said the Lover moves us from shame toward “passionate play and display.”

He was not recommending exhibitionism that ignores other people’s boundaries. He was describing the healthy capacity to appear—to inhabit one’s body, occupy one’s space, and let enthusiasm become visible.

Moore loved hats. He spoke about walking through the city in his Stetson and receiving puzzled looks from people who had lost any cultural language for male adornment. In many traditional cultures, he observed, men dress boldly. They wear brilliant colors and magnificent headdresses. They dance, perform, and display themselves without assuming that beauty belongs only to women.

“You don’t have to be rich to dress up,” he said, “except in spirit.”

That line contains much of his teaching. The healthy Lover does not require luxury. He requires permission to appreciate and participate in beauty.

The Lover Gives Power a Heart

Moore never intended the four archetypes to live in separate compartments. Each possesses a distinctive gift, but each becomes distorted when isolated from the others.

The Lover gives the King, Warrior, and Magician a heart.

The King without the Lover can organize, govern, and dominate, but he cannot bless. He does not experience the people of the realm as having inherent worth. Responsibility becomes a burdensome job because, as Moore put it, “You don’t steward things you don’t value.”

The Warrior without the Lover becomes a machine. He carries out the mission efficiently but no longer feels the value of the lives affected by it. Moore used The Terminator as his image of the loveless Warrior: focused, relentless, and utterly indifferent to the living world.

When Lover energy informs the Warrior, aggression becomes protection. The mature Warrior does not fight merely to satisfy an appetite for combat. He fights on behalf of something he loves—a child, a community, a principle, a forest, an ocean, or another person’s right to live.

The Magician without the Lover becomes detached. He can diagnose, interpret, invent, and manipulate, but may never ask whether his knowledge serves life. Moore saw this danger in scientists who ignore the moral consequences of their discoveries and therapists who become more interested in diagnosis than healing.

Knowledge alone does not make someone a healer. The Lover provides the wish that the other person actually become well.

For Moore, empathy itself contains Lover energy. It is the capacity to feel one’s way into another person’s experience while remaining ethical enough not to exploit the access.

The Lover therefore does more than provide pleasure. It humanizes power.

What Happens When the Lover Comes Through the Back Door

When the Lover is denied a legitimate room in the psyche, it does not disappear. It enters the other archetypes through what Moore called “the back door.”

In the King, denied desire may become eroticized domination. The leader, parent, teacher, therapist, or priest begins taking emotional or sexual gratification from people he is supposed to serve.

In the Warrior, Eros may become fused with aggression. Moore used Apocalypse Now—the helicopters, Wagner, napalm, surfing during combat, and rock music—to show how battle can become a source of ecstasy. Danger makes the man feel unmistakably alive, and destruction becomes exciting.

In the Magician, the Lover may appear as voyeurism. The person watches, analyzes, records, diagnoses, or lives through the intimate experiences of others while remaining outside embodied relationship himself.

Moore’s point was not that authority, aggression, or knowledge are inherently corrupt. It was that rejected desire seeks covert channels. The respectable persona may remain intact while the shadow arranges another life underneath it.

This is one reason he believed the garden needed to be acknowledged directly. We are less likely to demand unconscious gratification from our power, work, clients, children, or public role when the Lover has an honest place of its own.

Addiction as a Wounded Search for the Garden

Moore’s treatment of addiction was compassionate without being sentimental.

He regarded alcohol, drugs, compulsive sex, overeating, overwork, and other addictions as possible attempts to regulate overwhelming Lover energy. When early relationships have been shaming, rejecting, abusive, or unreliable, the person may never develop the internal structure needed to tolerate powerful feeling.

The substance then becomes a dependable companion. It is available when called. It alters the state of the self. It offers relief, intensity, communion, or oblivion without requiring the risks of a mutual human relationship.

Moore described addiction as a kind of unconscious ritual. It has an object, a sequence, a time, a place, a preparation, and a transformation of consciousness. It is a poor vessel, and often a deadly one, but it may nevertheless be performing a psychological function.

He called psychopathology a “creative compromise.” A destructive symptom may be standing between a person and something even more terrifying—fragmentation, unbearable emptiness, or suicide.

This led Moore to an important clinical caution: do not simply take away the old container until something better is available to perform the function it has been serving.

That does not make the addiction good. It means healing requires more than subtraction. The person needs relationships, structure, ritual, community, spiritual practice, and a gradually increasing ability to bear intensity without immediate discharge.

Moore admired Alcoholics Anonymous for precisely this reason. The meetings, honesty, sponsorship, repetition, steps, and shared recognition of danger create a conscious communal vessel where the solitary ritual of addiction once stood.

The goal is not to extinguish the fire. It is to build a hearth strong enough to hold it.

 

The Other Three Protect the Lover

Just as the Lover humanizes the other archetypes, the other three make mature love possible.

The King gives the Lover a center.

Moore compared this to balancing a powerful engine. Properly balanced, the engine can generate enormous horsepower at high speed without shaking itself apart. King energy provides the taproot or still point that allows a person to experience great passion without fragmenting.

The Warrior protects the garden.

Moore was emphatic about this: “Without the guards, there’s no garden.” The Lover itself does not love walls. It moves toward union, openness, participation, and the crossing of boundaries. The Warrior establishes the gate and decides what may enter.

That includes protecting time. Moore imagined calling upon an inner General Patton, tanks and all, to defend the weekend from work, appointments, duties, and worthy causes. Unless time for the garden is deliberately set aside, every other demand will invade it.

This is one reason intimacy so often disappears from marriage. During courtship, people will pay almost any price to reach the garden. After marriage, they begin assuming it will remain without protection. Work expands. Children, careers, obligations, and screens fill the available space. The garden does not die because marriage is inherently unromantic. It disappears because no one is guarding the gate.

The Warrior also protects the heart from abuse. Moore believed that men are frequently encouraged to become vulnerable without being taught how to defend themselves. But a man who cannot protect his heart will eventually withdraw from relationship. He may remain physically present while disappearing psychologically.

Moore’s point needs careful wording. Honesty, receptivity, and emotional openness are strengths. Defenselessness is not. Intimacy becomes sustainable when a man trusts that he can remain open and still say, “This treatment is not acceptable.”

Finally, the Magician notices.

The Magician scans the inner territory and asks which room has not been visited. A man may list all he is accomplishing, caring for, and producing while the Magician quietly asks, “Have you noticed what is missing?”

King centers the Lover. Warrior protects it. Magician remembers it. Together they make the garden inhabitable.

Men, Masculinity, and Intimacy

One of Moore’s most important observations was that many men do not need less masculinity in order to become intimate. They need a more secure masculine identity.

A man with a fragile sense of self may experience closeness as engulfment. Another person’s anger, need, or disappointment feels enormous. He fears that if he opens fully, he will disappear.

This can be difficult for women to understand, and Moore thought men were often ridiculed for it. But ridicule only deepens the wound. The man needs enough internal King and Warrior to know that he can remain himself while loving someone else.

This is why Moore distinguished sensitivity from pathological vulnerability. A secure man can be deeply receptive because he trusts his center and his boundaries. He can move toward another person without requiring that person to become an extension of himself.

Mature love recognizes a separate other.

That also means love cannot be possession. Moore spoke bluntly about relationships in which one person wants to keep another against his or her will. If the beloved chooses to leave, the loss may be agonizing. But secure selfhood makes it possible to grieve, offer a blessing, and let the person go.

Love says, “I value you.” Possession says, “I require you to keep me from collapsing.”

Restoring the Lover

Moore did not believe the Lover could be restored through explanation alone. The path back is experiential.

Read poetry. Listen to music. Attend live performances. Learn to dance. Spend time in nature. Cook something slowly. Work with your hands. Wear something that makes you feel more fully present. Protect unhurried time with the person you love. Notice beauty and resist the impulse to explain it immediately.

Moore was especially moved by men giving poems to other men at Robert Bly gatherings. He had received many things from men, he joked, including plenty of grief—but never a poem. In that ritual space, strong men could offer one another words they loved without embarrassment.

Dance mattered for the same reason. The Lover sometimes speaks in poetry or song, but often it does not want to speak at all. It wants to move.

Moore told men who felt disconnected from the Lover that they could spend a great deal of money talking about the problem in therapy—or they could take dance lessons. He was joking, but only partly.

He also recommended active imagination: entering a quiet state, allowing an image of the inner Lover to emerge, and asking what it wants. The ego does not have to obey every answer. In fact, it should not. But it is better to know what has been exiled than to discover it later through an act one cannot believe one has committed.

The larger practice is simple, though not easy: make room, protect the room, and learn to remain there.

 

The Whales

Moore ended the lectures by reading D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Whales Weep Not!”

It was a brilliant choice.

Lawrence’s whales are enormous, sensuous, sexual, playful, parental, and powerful. The mothers nurse their young. The bulls gather around the females and calves when danger threatens. Their strength does not compete with love. It protects love.

The whales bring Moore’s four archetypes together. The Lover supplies delight, sexuality, tenderness, and wonder. The Warrior forms the protective circle. The King preserves the order of life and family. The Magician recognizes the sacred pattern moving through it all.

The poem imagines divinity not as something removed from bodily life but flowing through it. The whales meet, mate, nurture, protect, and move through the great sea in a love beyond human explanation—what Lawrence called love “without words.”

Moore finished the poem and then added, with perfect timing, “That’s why you join Greenpeace.”

The line belongs to the time in which he spoke, and readers may have different opinions about Greenpeace today. But his larger point remains. We do not protect the living world most deeply because a policy tells us to. We protect it because we have learned to experience it as magnificent, vulnerable, sensuous, and valuable in itself.

The Lover makes ecological concern personal. A whale is no longer an abstract representative of biodiversity. It is a living presence—powerful, familial, beautiful, and worthy of protection.

That is the Lover’s final gift. It does not make a man weak. It allows him to feel what his strength is for.

The mature Lover protects the heart without closing it, transmits life without possessing it, and loves the world enough to defend it.

Men Are Good.

Chapter 9 - Seeing Men Clearly

Parental Alienation: When Separation Becomes Erasure

Losing daily contact with a parent is painful. Losing the relationship itself is something else entirely. Most custody disputes involve distance. Parental alienation involves something far more profound: the gradual disappearance of a parent from a child’s emotional world and, ultimately, from the child’s life, often reinforced by physical separation.

A child may still have access to a parent. Phone calls may be available. Visits may be scheduled. Court orders may remain in place. Yet over time the relationship begins to weaken, then fracture, and in some cases collapse. Affection gives way to suspicion. Familiarity gives way to distance. Love is gradually replaced by fear, anger, or indifference.

The Child Who Stops Calling

It often begins subtly. A child becomes reluctant to answer the phone. Conversations become shorter. Visits become strained. The rejected parent is bewildered. Nothing obvious has happened. No abuse. No abandonment. No dramatic betrayal. Yet the relationship appears to be dissolving.

The child begins speaking in language that sounds strangely adult. Old grievances are repeated. Minor mistakes become major offenses. Positive memories fade while negative interpretations multiply. The parent who was once loved becomes viewed almost entirely through a negative lens.

A Relationship Under Pressure

Children naturally want to love both parents. This is one of the most important realities to understand. Children generally do not enter the world looking for reasons to reject a mother or father. Their natural tendency is connection. They want both parents. They need both parents. They identify with both parents.

When children feel pressure to choose between parents, they often experience tremendous internal conflict. To reject a parent is, in some sense, to reject a part of themselves. This is why parental alienation can be so damaging. The child is not merely losing a relationship. The child is often losing a piece of his or her own identity.

The Research Begins to Notice

For many years, professionals paid little attention to the phenomenon. When fathers complained that children were being turned against them, they were often dismissed as bitter ex-spouses unwilling to accept divorce. Gradually, however, clinicians began observing patterns that were difficult to explain away.

Researchers and therapists noticed situations where children displayed extreme hostility toward a parent despite little evidence that the parent had done anything deserving such rejection. The child’s anger often seemed disproportionate, the accusations repetitive, and the thinking unusually rigid. The relationship appeared less like a normal response to parental shortcomings and more like the result of sustained influence.

Over time, the concept of parental alienation emerged as an attempt to describe these situations. Although professionals continue to debate definitions and terminology, few dispute that children can be influenced to fear, reject, or distance themselves from a parent. The question is not whether it happens. The question is how often. And what should be done when it does.

The Invisible Form of Family Violence

One way to understand parental alienation is to imagine a form of family violence that leaves no bruises. No broken bones. No emergency room visits. No police reports. Yet something precious is still being damaged: the bond between a parent and child.

A parent can recover from insults. A parent can recover from financial loss. Many parents never fully recover from losing a child. Not through death. Through rejection. The pain is difficult to describe. It is grief without a funeral. Loss without an end. Presence without relationship.

Why Children Are Vulnerable

Children trust the adults who care for them. That trust is necessary. Without it, childhood would be impossible. Yet the same trust that protects children can also make them vulnerable.

If a trusted adult repeatedly communicates that another parent is unsafe, uncaring, selfish, or unworthy, many children eventually absorb that message—not because they are foolish, but because they are children. The younger the child, the greater the vulnerability. A child has limited ability to independently evaluate competing claims. He relies heavily on the people he trusts. This is one reason parental alienation can be so powerful. It exploits one of childhood’s greatest strengths: trust.

The Father’s Voice

Although either parent can engage in alienating behavior, fathers often describe a particularly painful experience. Many enter court believing that if they remain calm, loving, and patient, the truth will eventually prevail. Instead, they sometimes discover that the relationship deteriorates while they wait.

Phone calls become less frequent. Visits become more tense. Years pass. Children grow older. The bond weakens. By the time anyone recognizes what has happened, much of the damage has already occurred.

One father described it this way: “I wasn’t losing a court case. I was losing my daughter.” That distinction captures the reality more accurately than any legal terminology. The issue is not primarily litigation. The issue is relationship.

The Child’s Loss

The greatest tragedy of parental alienation is often misunderstood. People assume the primary victim is the rejected parent. Certainly that parent suffers enormously. But a powerful and often unnoticed series of losses belongs to the child.

The child loses stories, memories, guidance, connection, identity, half of his history, and half of his family. Sometimes half of himself. Years later, many alienated children begin asking difficult questions. What really happened? Why did I stop seeing my father? Why did I believe those things? What did I miss?

Some find answers. Many do not. The lost years cannot be recovered.

Why We Didn’t Notice

Parental alienation reveals something important about the broader themes of this book. When a child loses contact with a father, many observers assume the father must have done something wrong. The possibility that the relationship itself might be under attack is often considered only much later.

This assumption flows from the same hidden layer we have seen repeatedly. Mothers are often viewed as natural caregivers. Fathers are often viewed as optional caregivers. When a child rejects a father, people frequently assume the father earned that rejection. When a child rejects a mother, people are more likely to ask what happened.

The difference is subtle. Yet it shapes perception. And perception shapes institutions. Just as it has throughout this book.

Men Are Good.