Even after Trump and Brexit, we cling to the idea that humans aren't naturally prejudiced – but the truth is we are

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His silence since being replaced by his Bizarro World nemesis has been as graceful as it has been poignant. How Barack Obama resisted the temptation time and again during these seven frenzied months beggars comprehension.

Finally, on the weekend, Donald Trump’s protracted silence about the perverted faith behind the terrorist attack in Virginia which led to the death of one young woman forced Obama to break his.

When he spoke, he borrowed the words of a black man whose refusal to reciprocate the hate of his racist tormentors dwarfed even Obama’s restraint. Spread over several tweets, the Nelson Mandela quote deserves reproducing in full.

“No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin or his background or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love. For love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

Collectively, those words make up the third most popular tweet of all time (though Trump, who can be a little competitive about Obama, will soon claim that one of his own chivalrous offerings about Rosie O’Donnell’s weight was liked and shared more).

It is a beautiful thought, and one of such timeless potency that we are reminded of Jesus Christ, who put it first and possibly best, and remains the most important political philosopher who ever lived. It has since been expressed countless times in various ways.

In 1967, a year after John Lennon made the proto-Trumpian declaration that they were “bigger than Jesus”, the Beatles offered their own bespoke version.

Two millennia after Jesus, half a century after ‘All You Need Is Love’, 27 years after Mandela took his slow walk to freedom from his Robben Island cell, and almost nine after Barack Obama was elected President with a demi-landslide, having faith in the thought becomes no easier.

And it is a matter of faith, blind faith, when the visual evidence from all over the world suggests that Mandela was wrong. Both the fear of otherness which is the primary malignancy, and the hatred that metastasises from that, seem encoded in human DNA.

People do not need lessons in fearing and hating. For whatever ancient survivalist reasons, we are naturally suspicious of otherness, and only with luck learn either to suppress or master it before the fear and hate follow.

Babies of six months show an innate preference for people with the same colour skin as them, according to a recently published research from the University of Toronto. Dementia victims routinely revert to offensive racial epithets they haven’t spoken or heard in decades when the perfect symmetry of this vicious life cycle strips learned behaviour away.

Donald Trump is an ignorant fool. But he has an instinctive genius for understanding and finessing the nastiest aspects of human nature, and every now and again unwittingly reveals it. When he jovially declared, “I love the poorly educated” at a campaign victory rally in Nevada 18 months ago, this was dismissed as another comic imbecility. Yet in an admittedly uncrowded field, it was the truest statement he ever made.

He loves the poorly educated because, while plenty of graduates are racists too, they are less likely to have learned to reason – from simple statistics as much as experience – that the fear of otherness is misplaced.

In western democracies that are wildly divided on several fronts (age, income, skin colour, geography), the most significant electoral schism now is one of schooling. With the surges of xenophobic voting either side of the Altantic – Brexit, Marine Le Pen’s rise in France, the election of Trump – the most reliable indicator of voting intention was the age at which a voter had left full-time education.

This is not solely because the tragic victims of inadequate education tend to be poorer, and have justified resentment towards traditional political establishments that have ignored and betrayed them. It is because education, in whatever field of study, imbues the ability to analyse data without which it is harder to distinguish fact from the fictions spun by the likes of Trump, Le Pen and Farage. The easily verifiable facts, for example, are that immigration is a net winner for the UK economy, and that the vast majority of terrorist killings in the US have been committed by white supremacists.

Donald Trump is not the only billionaire to whom ignorance is bliss. Every media baron whose outlets pour scorn on extending university entry appreciates the direct correlation between how much education a person has and how malleable they can be. The central aim of right-wing media ownership and the political movements with whom they are allied is conning the undereducated to vote diametrically against their own interests.

I no more believe that you can teach anyone to love than that love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite, or that all you need is love. If one cleaves to such beautiful thoughts in the face of human history, it is because not doing so feels like a counsel of despair.

But even the most benign articles of blind faith are useless in this unending war between reason and unreason. Education – though not at the sadly defunct Trump University – is the only effective weapon against the fear and hatred upon which every two-bit demagogue depends.