1.
Fratelli tutti, on fraternity and social friendship is an authentic ispiera – the ray of light that, penetrating through a crack in a shadowed environment, illuminates it, making visible what is stationed within. This encyclical letter is a magnificent companion to Laudato si’. While the latter focuses on the baleful consequences stemming from the disconnection between Humanity and Creation, Fratelli tutti urges us to create the universal fraternity needed to achieve “one world with a common plan”. This is a fitting message for a world that is rent by populism, nationalism, ethnocentrism and dangerous failures of global cooperation, even in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The specific aim that Pope Francis’ third encyclical (after Lumen fidei, 2013 and Laudato si’, 2015) pursues is twofold. On the one hand, its aim is to awaken in everyone, believers and non-believers or otherwise believers, the passion for the common good, urging everyone to draw direct consequences. On the other hand, it is to clarify concepts that are too superficially taken as synonyms or almost. The resulting confusion of thought does not help either dialogue or the prospect of the necessary lines of action. I will try and clarify.
Fraternity does not have the same meaning as brotherhood and even less as solidarity. While that of brotherhood is an immanent concept that speaks of the belonging of people to the same species or to a given community of destiny, fraternity is a transcendent concept that lays its foundation in the recognition of the common fatherhood of God. Brotherhood unites friends, but it separates them from non-friends; it makes associates (an associate is “one who is associated for certain interests”, 102) and therefore excludes the united from the others. Fraternity, on the other hand, precisely insofar as it comes from above (the fatherhood of God) is universal and creates brothers, not associates, and therefore tends to erase the natural and historical boundaries that separate.
Cain’s murder of his brother suggests that fraternity is not based on blood. Biological fraternity does not exist, meaning that there is no fraternity if we do not acknowledge our responsibility towards one another. Whereas brotherhood has a naturalistic premise, fraternity presupposes a common Father (Lumen Fidei, 54), which makes us guardians of each another. Indeed, when the Lord God peremptorily asked: “Cain, where is Abel, your brother?”, the murderer replied: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”. Cain acquired the title of brother only after admitting his guilt, that is, after taking responsibility for his actions. Fraternity, in the proper sense, is an invention of Christianity, even though common opinion associates it with the Republican triad. That is not our case, however. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) contained the words “liberty” and “equality”, but not “fraternity”, which was added later and never received much attention. We know why: no one had forgotten that that word had served to justify, and even legitimize, the terrible injustices of the Ancien Regime. The French Enlightenment’s choice of word disposition proved to be detrimental: liberty and equality, both conceived within the prevailing value of Modernity – individualism – are inherently divergent, conceptually contradictory principles.[1] Fraternity is what strikes a balance between liberty and equality. Frédéric Boyer wrote: “Liberty, without the awareness of having to share it with the other, becomes violence. And equality, without the awareness that it is primarily for the other, becomes mortal loneliness”. As Edgard Morin reminds us, liberty can be instituted and equality imposed. Fraternity, on the other hand, is not established by law; it comes from a personal experience of responsibility and must be practiced, first and foremost, for the good of the other, not because we feel obligated by some ruling. As Pope Benedict XVI recalled in his speech at the Teatro della Scala in Milan on the occasion of the seventh World Meeting of Families (June 1, 2012): “We are not in need of an unreal discourse by a distant God, or of a brotherhood which is not challenging. We seek a God who is close. We seek a fraternity which sustains others in the midst of suffering and thereby helps them journey on”.[2]
Fraternity is equally different from solidarity. It is a great merit of Christian culture to have been able to decline, in both institutional and economic terms, the principle of fraternity, making it become a cornerstone of social order. It was the Franciscan school of thought that gave this term the meaning it has preserved over time. There are pages of the Rule of Francis which help better understand the proper meaning of the principle of fraternity, which is to constitute, at the same time, the complement and the overcoming of the principle of solidarity. Indeed, while solidarity is the principle of social organization that allows the unequal to become equal, fraternity is the principle that allows the already equal to be diverse – mind you, not different. Fraternity allows people who are equal in their dignity and fundamental rights to express their plan of life or their charisma differently. The seasons we have left behind, the 1800s and especially the 1900s, were characterized by great battles, both cultural and political, in the name of solidarity and this was a good thing; think of the history of the trade union movement and the struggle for the conquest of civil rights. But the good society in which to live cannot be satisfied with the horizon of solidarity, because while a fraternal society is also a solidary society, the converse is not true. What makes the difference? Gratuitousness. Where this is lacking, there can be no fraternity. Gratuitousness is not an ethical virtue, as is justice. It concerns the supra-ethical dimension of human action; its logic is that of superabundance. The logic of justice, on the other hand, is that of equivalence, as Aristotle already taught. So we understand why fraternity goes beyond justice. In a perfectly just society – provided this is achievable – there would be no room for hope. What could its citizens ever hope for the future? Not so in a society where the principle of fraternity had managed to take root, precisely because hope is nourished by superabundance.
The fact that a human society in which the sense of fraternity is lost, and where everything comes down, on the hand, to improving transactions based on the trading of equivalents, and on the other hand to increasing the transfers made by public welfare organisations, is not a sustainable society, has been forgotten, would explain why it is that despite the quality of the intellectual forces at play, no credible solution has yet been offered for that trade-off. A society in which the principle of fraternity fades from view, is a society with no future; that is, a society is not capable of progressing if it is only capable of “giving to receive”, or of “giving as a duty”. This is why neither the liberal-individualist vision of the world, in which everything (or nearly everything) constitutes a trade-off, nor the State-centric vision of society, where everything (or nearly everything) is based on a sense of duty, can safely lead us out of the shallows, where the fourth industrial revolution is severely testing our existing model of civilisation.
A question arises spontaneously: why did Pope Francis choose the parable of the good Samaritan as the foundation of his approach to fraternity? The question makes sense because the Gospel says nothing (nor does it imply) about the relationship of reciprocity which, as we know, is necessary to preserve the bond of fraternity over time. Relationships between brothers and sisters are of reciprocity, not of exchange of equivalents of value and much less of command. Reciprocity is giving without losing and taking without taking away. There is no reciprocity between the Samaritan and the victim lying on the ground. The parable, therefore, is more an icon of solidarity or brotherhood than of fraternity in the proper sense. So what, then? With this choice, Pope Francis wanted us to fully understand the difference between proximity and closeness. The Levite and the priest were certainly close to the victim (all three were Jews), but were not in his proximity. Closeness is enough for brotherhood; fraternity postulates proximity.
The concept of neighbour is clearly outlined in the New Testament, both in the Sermon on the Mount and in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The scribe asks Jesus who his neighbour is; in turn, Jesus replies by modifying the question into subjective terms: “Who acted as a neighbour?” Rather than defining the category of “neighbour”, he clarifies that it is necessary to effectively “become someone’s neighbour”. Jesus accurately describes all of the Samaritan’s concerned and compassionate gestures: he helps the injured man and pays for his care as his wounds heal. This is exactly the line of thinking in Fratelli tutti. Pope Francis starts with recognising the current anthropological syndrome, which in the encyclical takes on various names: “complete separation between individuals and human community”; libertarian individualism; loss of roots; lack of integration between generations, and so on. Globalization standardizes peoples and cultures but does not unite them; it produces progress but not justice; it generalizes but does not provide universal meaning. Enlightened humanism failed because it decapitated the most Christian category, making it a contradictory ethical and political idea, that is, fraternity without a fraternal method turned into a coercive ideological program. Invoking social friendship (Fratelli tutti, 94, 99) or, rather, social charity (Fratelli tutti, 176, 182) is a strong thesis, because it aims at putting charity in practice within the context of effective politics, if one does not want to settle for mere brotherhood.[3]
2.
Where do the above clarifications lead us, in practice? For reasons of space, I will focus here on just a few relevant implications, those that I consider most urgent for the present time. First, it is necessary, once and for all, to realize the serious damage that the cultural matrix of libertarian individualism is producing. Individualism is the philosophical position according to which it is the individual who attributes value to things and even to interpersonal relationships. And it is always the individual who alone decides what is good and what is bad; what is right and wrong. In other words, everything to which the individual attributes value is good. There are no objective values for individualism, but only subjective values or legitimate preferences. Hence the implication that one must act “etsi communitas non daretur” (as if the community did not exist).
On the other hand, libertarianism is the thesis according to which, in order to establish individual freedom and responsibility, it is necessary to resort to the idea of self-causation, for which only the self-caused agent is fully free, as if he were God. We can now understand how the code word of this era was able arise from the combination of individualism and libertarianism, that is, from libertarian individualism: “volo ergo sum”, that is, “I am what I want”. The radicalization of individualism in libertarian terms, has led to the conclusion that every individual has a “right” to expand as far as his/her power allows him/her. Freedom as a release from all ties is the dominant idea in our societies today. Since they would limit freedom, ties are what must be dissolved. By mistakenly equating the concept of tie with that of bond, the conditionings of freedom – bonds – are confused with the conditions of freedom – ties, in fact. And this is because libertarian individualism fails to conceptualize the freedom of subjects “quae sine invicem esse non possunt” (which cannot be without reciprocity). If one admits that the person is an entity in an ontological relationship of proximity to the other, libertarianism has no reason to exist.
A second powerful invitation that comes to us from Pope Francis’ pressing magisterium is that of hastening the transition from the traditional (and now obsolete) model of responsibility to a richer model, equal to the challenges underway. In fact, the traditional interpretation of responsibility identifies it with the accountability of what a subject, autonomous and free, produces or puts into being. This notion therefore postulates the ability of an agent to be the cause of his/her acts and as such to be required to “pay” for the negative consequences that derive from them. This still prevalent conception of responsibility, however, leaves in the shadow what it means to be responsible.
For some time now, however, a sense of responsibility has begun to take shape that places it beyond the principle of free will and the sole sphere of subjectivity, to place it in function of life, to found a commitment that binds in the world. From the Latin res-pondus, responsibility essentially means carrying the weight of things, taking care of the other – as Lorenzo Milani’s “I care” taught us. Not only do you answer “to” but also “of”. On the one hand, responsibility today requires us to ask ourselves the problem of the constraints to which the decisions we make will be exposed over time in order to continue to be effective. On the other hand, the ability to respond cannot only refer to the immediacy of the present circumstances, but must include those temporal dimensions that ensure some continuity of the response itself. This is why the experience of responsibility cannot be exhausted in simple imputability. The statement of M.L. King “you may not be responsible for the situation you are in, but you will become responsible if you do nothing to change it” has rightly remained renowned. We are responsible not only and not so much for what we do, but rather for what we don’t do, even though we could do it. The omissive action is always more serious than the commissive one.
It is worth addressing a third practical implication of the discourse developed in Fratelli tutti. If we want to be right regarding the unworthy phenomenon of growing social injustices and the spread like wildfire of aporophobic attitudes – according to A. Cortina, aporophobia is the contempt for the poor and the different – we need to think seriously about a credible model of global governance. What is the difficulty in this regard? That of how to reconcile the internal governance rules of individual countries, each of which has its own specific history, its social norms of behavior, its cultural matrix with the uniformity of the rules that inevitably characterize global governance (D. Rodrik). Never forget, in fact, that the constraints external to the country, when it has to shape its domestic policies, always entail a cost in terms of democratic legitimacy – a cost which, as is happening nowadays, ends up reinforcing irrational pressures towards sovereign populism. It is therefore a question of choosing between two alternative concepts of global economic governance, known as “globalization enhancing global governance” and “democracy-enhancing global governance”. The basic idea of the second option is that when one starts drawing the rules at a transnational level, it is necessary to include among the objectives to be pursued not only the increase in efficiency in the allocation of resources, and therefore of income, but also the enlargement of the democratic base. To put it another way, it is indeed true that globalization increases the space of negative human rights (i.e. freedom from), but it also restricts the space, if not corrected by social safeguard clauses, of positive human rights (i.e. freedom of). Pope Francis does not hesitate to take a stand in favor of the second option. (See n.154 et seq.).
And with good reasons. Pope Francis is clear about how the notion of the common good should be understood. The overly simplistic way in which this category was treated in the Conciliar Decree Gaudium et Spes (GS) certainly cannot be accepted by those who – like Pope Francis – know the difference between common good and total good. GS n. 74 states that: “The common good embraces the sum of those conditions of the social life whereby men, families and associations more adequately and readily may attain their own perfection (2)”. The common good, therefore, is not an end in itself, but only an instrument for the good of an individual or a group. John Paul II corrected this “oversight” in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, published in 2004: “The common good does not consist in the simple sum of the particular goods of each subject of a social entity. Belonging to everyone and to each person, it is and remains common, because it is indivisible and because only together is it possible to attain it, increase it and safeguard its effectiveness… No expression of social life – from the family to intermediate social groups, associations, enterprises of an economic nature, cities, regions, States, up to the community of peoples and nations – can escape the issue of its own common good, in that this is a constitutive element of its significance and the authentic reason for its very existence” (n. 164-165; italics added). It should be noted that this definition not only underlines the specific notion of the common good – its non-separability – but also shows how to achieve it. In particular, “[In the democratic State] those responsible for government are required to interpret the common good of their country not only according to the guidelines of the majority but also according to the effective good of all the members of the community, including the minority” (n. 169). The State, therefore, interprets what the common good is, but does not determine or sanction it, because the State is “an expression of the civil society” (n. 168), not the opposite, as the many versions of the ethical State would like to imply.
3.
A noteworthy novelty of this encyclical, which has not gone unnoticed and which will continue to be discussed for a long time, is constituted by chapter V, significantly and provocatively entitled “
A Better Kind of Politics”. There are two wrong ways – Pope Francis tells us – to face the challenges of this moment. On the one hand, the way of those who give in to the temptation to remain above reality with utopia; on the other hand, the way of those who place themselves below reality with dystopia, with resignation. We cannot fall into such traps. We cannot wander between the carefree optimism of those who see the historical process as a triumphal march of humanity towards its complete realization and the desperate cynicism of those who think, along with Kafka, that “there is a point of arrival, but no way”. Welcoming the perspective of fraternity today means this: not considering ourselves either as the mere result of processes that fall outside our control, or as a self-sufficient reality without the need for relationships with the other. In other words, it means thinking that what awaits us is never entirely determined by what precedes us. If we want the social order that we call capitalism to be able to fully respect the right of each individual to decide for himself/herself how to value his/her life and, at the same time, be able to show equal consideration for the destiny of each person, there is no other way than that of politics, but a better kind of politics! Taking note that capitalism today risks paralysis, or, worse, collapse, because it is becoming more capitalist than it is useful for, is the first step to start a credible project of transformation of the existing social order.
In particular, Fratelli tutti strongly insists on the shortcomings stemming from the separation between market and democracy which has taken place in the last forty years. After stating that “The marketplace, by itself, cannot resolve every problem, although much we are asked to believe this dogma of neoliberal faith” (168), Pope Frances writes: “Here I would once more observe that politics must not be subject to the economy, nor should the economy be subject to the dictates of an efficiency-driven paradigm of technocracy”. (177) One of the many legacies that modernity has left us – certainly not a positive one – is the belief that access to the “economics club” is granted to profiteers if you are an entrepreneur, and to utility maximizers if you are a consumer. This absurd conceptualization – generated by the theoretical error that confuses the market economy, which is the genus, with its particular species, which is the capitalist system – has conflated economics with the place (regulated by efficiency) where wealth is produced, and not also where it is distributed and has led us to think of the social sphere as the place of redistribution, where solidarity and/or compassion (public or private) are the fundamental canons. We have seen and are still seeing the consequences of this separation. In the last thirty years the indicators of interstate and intrastate social inequality have increased outrageously, even in those countries where the welfare state has played an important role in terms of resource management.
Yet, legions of economists and political philosophers long believed that Kant’s proposal – “let’s make the cake bigger and then divide it equally” – was the solution to the problem of equity. This calls to mind the eloquent aphorism launched by the neo-conservative economic thought according to which “a rising tide lifts all boats”, hence the famous trickle-down effect thesis: wealth sooner or later trickles down to everyone, even the poorest, as a sort of beneficial rain. Evangelii gaudium is where Pope Francis proves this dangerous metaphor false. Fratelli tutti indicates that the way out of this problem is to put back together what has been artfully separated. Taking a stance in favour of that concept of the market (typical of the civil economy paradigm associated to the name of the Neapolitan Antonio Genovesi)[4] according to which the social bond cannot be reduced to the “cash nexus” alone, the encyclical suggests that human sociality can be experienced within a normal economic life, not outside of it, as the dichotomous model of social order based on State and Market pillars would like us to think. The challenge to accept therefore is that of Plato’s second navigation: the economy must neither be seen as conflicting, endemically and ontologically, with the good life, because it is considered a place of exploitation and alienation, nor as the place where all of society’s problems can be solved, as the Anarchist-Liberal thought suggests.
4.
A major obstacle to universal fraternity is the worrying increase in social inequalities, year after year, both in advanced nations and on a global scale. Why is it that inequalities are increasing at a faster pace than national income? Why is it that public opinion is so little interested in such a devastating phenomenon? A recent work by the well-known economist Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (2016) helps us find an answer to these questions. Milanovic’s main argument is that inequality is not pre-ordained, neither is it a constant in time or space. It is not destined to be since it is related to the rules of the economic game, that is, to the institutional arrangements that countries have decided to fix. One only has to think of economic institutions such as the labour market, the banking system, the welfare model, the tax system and so on. The design of these arrangements will have different consequences in terms of the way income and wealth are distributed among those who contributed to the production of that income and wealth. Neither are inequalities a constant over time, since there are periods in history in which they increase, and others in which they decrease; neither are they a spatial constant, since there are countries in which the Gini Index – which measures the gap between rich and poor – is higher than in other countries.
The question therefore is: if increasing inequality is not the result of a lack of resources, or of insufficient technological know-how, or of particular adversities affecting given categories of individuals, then what it is ultimately due to, and above all, why are there not waves of protest against such a state of affairs? The most plausible answer is that this is due to the continued belief in the dogmas of injustice within our societies. (Pareto, indeed, saw inequality as a sort of iron law which the human race would never be free of). Basically, there are two dogmas in question here. The first is that society as a whole benefits if each individual pursues his/her own personal interests. This is untrue on two counts: firstly, because Smith’s argument of the invisible hand, in order to hold true, postulates that markets be close to the ideal of free competition, with no monopolies or oligopolies, nor asymmetric information. However, everyone knows that the conditions for perfect free competition are never met in practice. This is why the famous Cambridge economist Joan Robinson wrote that “the invisible hand might do its work but by strangulation” (“The pure theory of international trade”, Review of Economic Studies, 1946, p. 99). Secondly, because different people possess different skills and abilities: consequently, if the rules of the game are shaped in such a way as to reward conduct of an opportunistic, dishonest, immoral kind, then those persons whose dispositions are characterised by such tendencies, will end up crushing the others. Likewise, avidity, that is, the passionate desire to possess things, is a characteristic trait of human nature. Therefore, if incentive systems are introduced into the workplace – not rewards, but incentives – then it is clear that the more avid workers would tend to dominate their less avid colleagues. Thus it can be said that poor people are such not by nature, but as a result of social conditioning, that is, due to the way in which economic institutions are designed.
The other dogma of inequality is the belief that elitism should be encouraged since it is highly effective; in other words, the wealth of the majority of the population would grow to a greater degree if the abilities of the few were promoted. Therefore, greater resources, attention, incentives and prizes should go to the most gifted members of society, since it is their endeavour and commitment that guarantees society’s advancement. Consequently, the exclusion of the less gifted from the economic activity – through their employment in temporary and precarious jobs and/or their unemployment, for example – is not just normal, but is also necessary if the GDP growth rate is to increase.
Citing technical reasons for concealing specific ideological choices is not good science. Aristotle wrote that the debate over equality and inequality centres on the criteria governing the distribution of goods and resources among groups, and aims to identify methods with which to deal with the diversity among citizens in a fair way. Thus it is wrong – fallacious even – to try and legitimise, or even to justify, inequality as a measure designed to maintain the incentive to work, to reward merit, and ultimately to guarantee efficiency; since as Vilfredo Pareto, the inventor of the efficiency concept in the late nineteenth century pointed out, efficiency belongs to the category of means and not that of ends. It is necessary to establish beforehand what end is to be pursued in an efficient manner, and this requires making explicit the value judgement which can then guide the pursuit of that end. Economists, with few worthy exceptions, are responsible for the fact that despite being aware of the redistributive effects of globalisation, they have failed to talk about or discuss the matter outside academic circles, at least not until recently. Perhaps this is because they feared offering arguments in favour of populist theses; however, the outcome has been that the hegemony of one-track thinking has ended up fostering the most obnoxious forms of radicalism.
During the years after the end of World War Two, Simon Kuznets (“Economic growth and income inequality”, American Economic Review, 45, 1955) had offered a glimmer of hope with his famous curve: an inverted U-shaped relation between income inequality and economic growth. By setting out pro-capita income on the x-axis, and the Gini coefficient, as the indicator of the degree of inequality, on the y-axis, the resulting curve would suggest that during the early phases of a nation’s development, when pro-capita income is growing but is still low, disparities tend to increase; later, when the critical threshold of average income has been reached, the curve begins to fall. Thus the Gini coefficient gradually diminishes as the growth process advances. However, the famous American economist had pointed out that the reversal of the slope of the curve would not be the result of market forces alone, but thanks to the targeted initiatives adopted by the government and by the various civil society organizations.
However, what actually happened was that from the 1970s onwards, following the success of the neo-liberal ideological and political project, this latter condition was side-lined, and consequently the Kuznets curve was interpreted as meaning that there was no longer any need to unduly worry about the question of inequality, given that over time things would have adjusted themselves provided the economy continued to grow at a substantial rate. This conclusion is what formed the basis of the well-known trickle-down effect thesis. This would also explain why it was that until the beginning of the new century, economists in general tended to display a kind of benign neglect with regard to the distributive question. They felt they had to focus on growth theory instead just to explain how the tide was to be raised. Unfortunately, the rising tide only managed to raise up the luxury yachts! The International Monetary Fund has recently expressed a rather singular position – singular insofar as it is in complete contrast with the same organisation’s previous position – as described by J. Ostry et al., “Neoliberalism: oversold?”, Finance and Development, IMF, June 2016. According to the authors of this work, neoliberalism’s distributional policies have had strongly perverse effects on inequality. They are referring, in particular, to the liberalisation of capital movements and to fiscal consolidation, that is, to austerity policies.
Many of the social ideologies that are around in our world are obstacles to universal fraternity. Defenders of neoliberal ideology argue that positive spillovers on the poor of the free-market economy justify the toleration of greed, and even rename avarice as “entrepreneurship”. Another ideological source of resistance to universal fraternity is the view that one’s obligation to share with others ends at the borders of one’s nation. Whence the tension between the global and the local highlighted by pope Francis.
5.
To conclude, a famous passage by William Blake – a poet and artist nourished by the Holy Scriptures – helps us grasp the power of the principle of fraternity: “I sought my God and my God I couldn’t find; I sought my soul and my soul eluded me; I sought to serve my brother in his need, and I found all three: My God, my soul, and thee”. Indeed, it is in the practice of giving as gratuitousness that the person jointly encounters his/her own self, the other and God. We live in a desert era of thought, which struggles to conceive the complexity of the human condition. It is a crumbled thought that struggles to see the relationships between the many dimensions of our crisis. Fraternity and social friendship, in the manner of a social vaccine, then show us the open way out of the gloomy situation of the existing.
Fratelli tutti proposes a heart open to the world in response to the challenges of our time, advancing the ethics of fellowship and friendship, of goodwill and dialogue, in an effort to dispel “the dark clouds over a closed world” (Ch. 1). The message of hope that emanates from Fratelli tutti is that despite the many negativities, “Today we have a great opportunity to express our innate sense of fraternity” (n. 77). The pandemic – which has become an experimentum crucis of our human condition – is the extraordinary circumstance that helps us to grasp this message. The great challenge is therefore how not to lose our subjective sense of liberty while not threatening the other’s space, not just by not invading it, but by contributing to its enrichment.
END NOTES
[1] Amartya Sen formally proved this in his famous 1970 paper, The impossibility of a Paretian Liberal.
[2] Vv.Aa., La Famiglia. Il lavoro e la festa, Milan, Centro Ambrosiano, 2012, p. 17, (italics added).
[3] The recent essay by Charles Wilber, Was the Good Samaritan a bad Economist?, Norton, New York, 2021 is also interesting. The American economist wittily argues that, according to the paradigm of homo oeconomicus, the Good Samaritan may have acted in an irrational and therefore commendable way.
[4] For a rational reconstruction of this theoretical paradigm, see L. Bruni and S. Zamagni, Civil Economy. Another Idea of the Market, Newcastle u.T., Agenda, 2016.