Tajfel would laugh cynically and weep.

Six years on. How curious that the single actions of a single day can so change the world. How curious that as much as the world has changed in the intervening years, it has remained much the same.

You would think that we would have learned from the lessons of the past, but if history is any decent a teacher, we discover that rarely, if ever, does man learn from it.

Action and reaction, that’s what our world is built on. An internalised ‘just-world-matrix’, where every action must necessarily have a reaction, where everything is either justifiable, or those actions are justifiable.

If the past years have taught us anything, it has shown man’s complete inability to release himself from the status quo and the systems which perpetuate and justify that status quo. As Jost and Banaji wrote, we as humans, for all our bluster and drive to change, seem radically unmotivated to actually do so. In our ever-changing world, concrete change, it seems, is the exception, not the norm.

Instead, we’ve surrounded ourselves in a web of fear and wariness. I remember one day when a goods vehicle crossed the border illegally. My men and I were activated and spent the next six hours under the sun and rain (we were unlucky enough to experience the extremes of both) out at sea ‘just in case’ anything should happen.

Inefficiencies of the military mind aside, what manner of paranoia-motivated response would engender such an immediate over reaction?

It seems we live in a world of fear. Fear, as I have found, breeds distrust. Distrust breeds prejudice. And prejudice is the primary reason why we’re in this mess anyway. As much as we try to protect ourselves, we end up creating defences against imagined enemies.

George Aiken once said that if we were to one day wake up and all share the same race, colour and creed, the human race would still find some other cause for prejudice by noon.

It’s sad, but I find myself inclined to agree. Conflict seems to be an essential part of the human psyche, as much as we try to deny it. But just because it is essential, it doesn’t mean that we cannot rise above it.

Consider the examples of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Both were gifted orators, both were civil rights activists, both were charismatic men, both were martyred for their beliefs. Yet we see one was Christian and the other Muslim. Yet they were kindred spirits in a fashion that transcends professed creeds.

Imagine, if you will, if instead of raising arms to fight what we perceived as an injustice, we laid them down and tried to understand and forgive? Imagine one people, one family, maybe not under one God, but certainly sharing one humanity. So maybe I’m a dreamer, but so was Lennon.

Six years on, its time we dared to change, isn’t it?