In Jean Piaget’s body of research on child development, the concept of “conservation” plays an important role. It refers to one’s ability to hold onto a critical but low-salience reality in the face of a high-salience, distorting event. The best example is probably Piaget’s experiment in which a child is shown two balls of clay and is asked to make sure they are exactly equal. Then one ball is transformed into a cigar shape, and the child is asked whether the ball has more clay, the cigar has more clay, or whether they are both the same. Until around age 5 or 6, a child will say the ball has more (because it is fatter) or the cigar has more (because it is longer), but typically not say that they are the same. Around age 6, when children reach the stage of “concrete operations,” they will say “the same.” They know that the shape looks different, but the mass is the same.
Recently, I watched the British-Israeli documentary Naza, and it occurred to me that hatred can be considered an example of what Piaget called “horizontal décalage.” This occurs when someone who has mastered conservation in one realm (in the case of the two balls, physical) demonstrates a failure to attain conservation in another (in the case of hatred, emotional) realm. The less evolved (in this case, emotional) realm develops later due to it being more complex and less amenable to conscious reflection.
What Is Emotional Non-Conservation and How Does It Cause Hatred?
Emotional non-conservation means that when a person does something terrible, the shock of that action moves them from respect into hatred. Because human beings, in the eyes of mainstream religion (as well as mainstream psychotherapy), never lose their value regardless of their actions, the hatred can be thought of as a failure of emotional conservation.
In Hebrew, naza is an abbreviation for a term meaning “collateral damage.” It was used in the Israeli military in Gaza to estimate the number of noncombatants likely to die when bombing (usually at night) the homes of suspected Hamas operatives. The film consists of interviews with 24 (mostly male) Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers who were involved in developing and operating the AI-driven targeting system used in that process. Thus, if a target was believed to house six non-combatants, it would be described as having “six naza.”
Most of the people anonymously interviewed (such as a drone operator who admits to having killed many noncombatants, including dozens of children) came by 2025 (when the interviews were conducted) to view their actions as morally wrong. When asked why he did what he did, one interviewee said simply “hatred,” pointing to the October 7, 2023 massacre in which approximately 1,200 Israelis (three-fourths of them civilians) were killed. That event was seen as so evil that killing anyone connected to a possible perpetrator was viewed as a justified action. A related aspect of this process, mentioned by some interviewees, is that the targeting system resembled a video game, with all the exhilaration one can feel in obliterating enemy targets not really experienced as actual human beings.
How Does Rational Emotive Therapy Help Overcome Hatred?
In three 2023 Psychology Today posts in which I analyzed the “disappointments, annoyances and hatreds” detailed in Prince Harry’s memoir “Spare,” I alluded to my use of Albert Ellis’ Rational Emotive Therapy (RET) to overcome my own tendency toward emotional dysregulation, including hatred (of self and others). In Ellis’ system, based on both Stoic philosophy and the General Semantics theory of Alfred Korzybski (a former military officer turned pacifist), hatred is a form of over-generalization stemming from use of the verb to be (as in “he is evil”) rather than the verbs to do (as in “he did something undesirable”) or to have (as in “he has some undesirable tendencies”). Emotional maturation in Ellis’ psychotherapy framework (as well as Carl Rogers’ humanistic “Person-Centered Therapy” and its core notion of unconditional positive regard) is grounded in the idea of conserving the value of all humans, no matter what they might have done to us or others.
Moral and emotional evolution away from having hatred as a core motivator is very relevant as well to two of the eight reasons for opposing the death penalty I mentioned in my recent Psychology Today post inspired by the aborted execution of Christa Pike. The two reasons are the moral consensus moving in an abolitionist direction (just under half of American states have abolished it) and the myth that it helps victims’ families to achieve closure. In Europe, where the death penalty has been virtually eliminated (Belarus and Russia are the only countries where it is still on the books, and Russia has had a moratorium on its use since 1996), the main reason cited is Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which states that every human being has a right to life. In terms of victims and their families, it is worth noting that while some families (such as the relatives of the young woman killed by Pike) call for its use, that is not universally the case. As an example, passage of abolitionist legislation in Colorado was made possible when Rhonda Fields, a state senator whose son had been murdered, switched from wanting his killers executed to a different view in which she came to see such a revenge motive as wrong.
Both moral and victim evolution can be seen in the case of the last person executed in the U.S. military: John A. Bennett. He was an African-American soldier hanged in 1961 for the 1955 rape and attempted murder of an 11-year-old Austrian girl named Gertrude. Today, when execution in the U.S. is reserved only for the crime of murder, he would be spared for that reason and for his likely having intellectual disability. In terms of victim evolution, the emotionally mature Gertrude, at age 17, petitioned President Kennedy to spare Bennett’s life, but that request was denied.
Copyright Stephen Greenspan.