A Letter to Humanity

To you, human being, whoever you are and wherever you may be, beneath the same sun that shines upon us all:

We ask you for no money. We ask you to adopt no ideology. We ask you to renounce neither your beliefs nor your homeland, neither your culture nor your way of understanding the world. We ask of you something far simpler and, perhaps, far harder:

Stop for five minutes.

Five minutes amid the noise. Five minutes without news, without screens, without flags, without quarrels, without interests, without victors or vanquished. Five minutes being only what you already were before the world began to tell you who you ought to be:

A human being.

Look around you

We have raised cities that brush the sky. We have crossed the oceans, conquered diseases that for centuries seemed invincible, built extraordinary machines, joined the continents in a single second and gathered a store of knowledge that would have seemed impossible to those who came before us.

And yet, tonight a child will go to bed hungry. Tonight a mother will hold her child beneath the thunder of a war, cover his ears with her hands and tell him that nothing is wrong. Tonight there will be human beings despised for the colour of their skin, for the place where they were born, for the language they speak, for the god to whom they pray or for praying to none. And tonight there will be men and women who possess far more than they could ever need in several lifetimes, while others, a few streets away or a few hours by air, lack water, food, shelter, medicine or a single opportunity.

And we must dare to ask an uncomfortable question:

How did we come to this?

Something has not worked

We do not write these words in search of culprits. Blame seldom builds anything. We write them in search of conscience, which is quite another thing: blame looks back; conscience looks straight ahead.

For something has not worked. Perhaps many of the institutions we inherited from our forebears were born of good intentions. Perhaps some fulfilled great purposes. Perhaps others failed. And perhaps certain structures came, in the end, to serve interests other than those for which they were conceived, without anyone pausing to check, because the larger a thing is, the easier it becomes for no one to look at it. We do not assert this: we ask it.

We must study it. We must ask it. We must have the courage to recognise what works, and the greater courage still to transform what does not. For the result lies before us: there are still wars. There is still hunger. There is still racism, hatred, exploitation, loneliness, abandonment and injustice. And while all of this goes on, we carry on with our lives as though the suffering of someone born ten thousand kilometres away belonged to another world.

But there is no other world. There is this one. And we all stand beneath the same sun.

Before we are citizens, we are human beings

No one chose where to be born. No one chose the colour of their skin, nor the language they first heard in their mother’s arms. No one chose to come into the world in a rich family or a poor one, in peace or beneath the bombs, surrounded by opportunity or condemned from childhood to struggle simply to survive.

Birth is chance. Dignity should not be.

We have divided the Earth into countries, territories, jurisdictions and frontiers. It is likely that some form of organisation is necessary for the administration of human societies. But an administrative border should never become a moral one.

A passport may say where a person was born. It cannot say what that person is worth.

Beneath all our nationalities there lies an older belonging: we are human. Long before we learnt words such as Spanish, Colombian, African, European, Asian, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, rich, poor, foreigner or native, we were simply children looking out at the world with the same eyes. Differences exist, and they deserve respect. But no difference justifies our forgetting that we belong to one species, that we share one home, and that we know the same grief when we lose someone we love.

Our blood knows nothing of passports. Hunger knows nothing of borders. Tears have no nationality. And a mother’s love for her child needs no translation.

To those of us fortunate enough to be born with more

Those of us who were born where there is food, where there are schools, hospitals, roads, clean water, safety and possibilities that millions of people have yet to know should feel no guilt for it.

We should feel responsibility.

Privilege is not a sin. But it can become a moral obligation, for whoever is able to help, and chooses to help, exercises one of the highest forms of human freedom. We need not save the world alone; no one can. But neither can we hide behind the magnitude of the problem in order to do nothing.

A plate of food does not end the hunger of the world. But it ends the hunger of one person for that day. A well does not quench the thirst of the world. But it can transform the life of an entire community. A school does not erase ignorance. But it can change the destiny of hundreds of children. One person cannot stop every war. But millions of people with their eyes open can see to it that war is no longer accepted as an inevitable fate of our species.

Everything begins with someone.

Perhaps we have forgotten something essential

We spend much of our lives accumulating: money, property, recognition, possessions, followers, power, security. And yet there is one truth before which every title and every fortune dissolves:

One day we shall leave. All of us.

The king and the beggar. The businessman and the worker. The president and the stranger. The one who amassed an immense fortune and the one who scarcely held a few coins. There will come a moment when no bank account can buy a single minute more. And then, perhaps, the most important question will not be ‘how much did I gain?’, but another, older and simpler:

What did I do while I was here?

Whom did I help? Whom did I lift up? Who lived a little better because I existed? What did I leave behind me? Perhaps the true wealth of a life is measured not by what we managed to keep, but by what we were able to give.

We still believe in the human being

In spite of our history, we believe profoundly in humanity. We have seen atrocities, but we have also seen people walk into burning buildings to save strangers. We have known wars, but also men who refused to kill. We have known hatred, but also those who forgave what seemed unforgivable. We have known selfishness, but every day, in places no newspaper will ever mention, millions of people share their bread, nurse the sick, adopt children, rescue animals, sit with the elderly, comfort strangers and give part of their lives to others without expecting any reward.

The human being is capable of extraordinary goodness.

Perhaps our greatest error has been to build, too often, systems that feed our worst instincts rather than our finest virtues: competition without limit, accumulation without purpose, the permanent division between us and them, the notion that for someone to win, someone else must necessarily lose. If human beings are, so often, better than their systems, then perhaps the problem lies not so much in human beings as in the systems. And what was built can be studied.

Perhaps the time has come to investigate whether we can build something different. Not out of naivety, nor from a utopia drawn up on paper, but from study, evidence, experience, dialogue and one constant question:

Can we do better?

Omnia Sub Sole is born of that question

‘Everything under the sun’. That is our name, and it is also our way of looking: no truly important question should be forbidden, and nothing the sun shines upon should lie beyond examination. We wish to observe. We wish to investigate. We wish to understand. We wish to review what we believe we know, taking nothing for granted, not even what everyone repeats; not even the shape and dimensions of this supposed planet (under investigation) that we call home, because to measure again, with one’s own hands, is also a form of respect for the truth. And whoever is willing to measure the house anew is also willing to review its rules.

What begins here is, for that reason, a profound study of the entire model in which we live. We undertake it because it is necessary, and because the state of this world is there for all to see. We wish to study our errors as a civilisation: war and peace, wealth and poverty, frontiers, intolerance, cooperation, power, our institutions and our own nature. And we wish to look with particular attention upwards: towards the institutions that govern the world, the highest of them, those which, precisely because of their height, are so seldom examined, as though the size of a thing were proof of its rightness. We think the opposite: the intelligent course is to analyse the obvious. Not in order to tear anything down: in order to understand it.

We wish to put the present system to the test in all its grandeur, with respect and without haste, beginning with the banking system, not because we single it out, but because almost everything else passes through it: bread, home, school, medicine; and then to go on, model after model, to the last one that can possibly be analysed. Not with suspicion or slogans, but with the oldest and the newest instruments of reason: logic, which asks whether one thing follows from another; coherence, which asks whether what a system says of itself matches what it does; balance, which asks whether what that system gives and what it demands stand in proportion; and simulation, which today allows us to travel, by means of algorithms, many different paths and to see, before choosing one, where each of them leads. Accusing no one. Assuming nothing. Asking, and checking.

And we wish to do all of this without turning this Foundation into the property of an ideology, a religion, a party or a person.

We do not wish to tell you what to think. We wish to invite you to think.

We do not wish to gather followers. We wish to gather free human beings. People able to disagree without hating one another. People able to admit a mistake. People able to change their minds in the face of better evidence. People able to ask themselves what kind of world we are leaving to those who are not yet born. For our children will inherit our decisions, and one day they will judge us not only by what we did, but also by what, having been able to change it, we chose to tolerate.

My commitment

My name is Francisco Salvatierra Sánchez. I was born in Spain and today I live in Colombia. I have known two shores of the same world and, the more I observe this supposed planet (under investigation), the harder I find it to accept that the place where a person is born can decide so profoundly the opportunities they will have for the whole of their existence.

I am not founding Omnia Sub Sole because I believe I possess the truth.

I am founding it precisely because I wish to seek it.

I do not have all the answers. I have questions, a great many. And I have one conviction:

Our generation has a duty to try to leave the next a better world than the one it received.

That is why I wish to begin with myself. I place at the service of this work what I have and what I am. I give my time. I give my labour. I give my resources. I give the land set aside for the future home of this Foundation. I give my questions, my mistakes, my capacity to learn and whatever years of life may yet be granted to me. And, above all of this, I give the one thing that cannot be measured:

I give my heart.

I do not wish this work to belong to me. I wish that one day it should no longer need me. That it should endure when my name is no more than an old inscription in some document. That others should go on asking, investigating, helping and building. And that, perhaps a hundred years from now, someone should walk through the doors of what today we are only beginning, and understand that there was a generation that chose to try. That would be enough.

And now it is your turn

We do not ask you to agree with every one of these words. We ask only that you do not pass over them too quickly.

Stop.

Think of someone you love. Of your children, if you have them. Of your parents. Of the person whose absence would break your heart. And then consider that, somewhere in this world, another person feels exactly that same love for someone. That person may have a different skin, a different language, a different religion, a different passport. They may live in a mansion or beneath a tin roof. But they love. They are afraid. They dream. They suffer. They laugh. They weep. And they want their children to have a better life. Exactly as you do.

Perhaps humanity will begin to change on the day we understand that this stranger is not so strange after all.

They are one of us.

We have an extraordinary opportunity. We are alive. Now. In this very instant. We can still choose what we do with the time that remains to us. We can go on inheriting, unexamined, the hatreds, the divisions and the errors of those who came before us. Or we can stop. Think. Ask. Understand. Forgive. Share. Build. Help. And begin again wherever it is necessary.

We do not know whether our generation will succeed in changing the world. Perhaps no generation can do so entirely. But there is one thing we do know:

We do not wish to leave this world without having tried.

When one day our children ask us what we did while other human beings suffered, we want to be able to look them in the eye and say:

We saw it. We did not look away. We tried.

For above our frontiers, our differences, our riches and our beliefs there exists a truth far older than any of them:

We are one humanity.

One immense family, imperfect, wounded and extraordinary. And there is still time to remember that we belong to one another; that no one who suffers should be wholly a stranger to us; that no life is worth less for having begun on the other side of a border; and that, so long as there remains one human being willing to hold out a hand to another, there will still be hope.

Stop for five minutes. Look at the world. Look at yourself. And ask yourself:

What can I do?

Perhaps that is where everything begins.

Francisco Salvatierra SánchezFounder of the Omnia Sub Sole Philanthropic Foundation