Ubuntu Philosophy: Wealth Resides in the Health of the Community

What do you think wealth looks like? Is it the classic combination of private jet, Monaco-moored yacht, and Bond-villain mansion? Is it control of a global corporation? Is it perpetually jumping between luxury destinations with a full team of staff?

Or maybe materialistic conceptions of wealth don’t do it for us. True wealth, we might think, is not embodied by the money-spinning tycoon who’s helicoptered between meetings, preoccupied by market performance, and paranoid about the motives of those close to them…

No; true wealth involves stepping off the materialistic treadmill entirely. Ancient Stoic philosopher Seneca had it right: time, not money, is our most precious resource…

But whether we consider ‘time’ or ‘money’ to be the better measure, these popular conceptions of wealth actually share some key assumptions.

Both revolve entirely around the self. Both are built on the premise that wealth is something tied to particular individuals. And both involve the attempt to stockpile a certain resource: I just need more money; I just need more time.

Here is another conception of what it means to be rich: wealth resides in the health and happiness of one’s community.

This kind of thinking underpins what anthropologists sometimes call ‘gift economies’. In her 2020 book The Serviceberry, ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer brilliantly captures how they work in some Indigenous societies:

[G]ift economies [are] an antecedent alternative to market economies, another way of ‘organizing ourselves to sustain life.’ In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away. In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away. The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity. A gift economy nurtures the community bonds that enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is ‘we’ rather than ‘I’, as all flourishing is mutual.

While Kimmerer’s book is rooted in a North American ecology, it matches a key teaching of the southern African philosophy of Ubuntu: life is best understood — and approached — through the lens of ‘we’ rather than ‘I’.

Ubuntu: a person is a person through other persons

The term ubuntu comes from Bantu, a group of sub-Saharan languages, and it essentially means humanness. Ubuntu has existed as an ethical way of life for several centuries across southern Africa, and one of its core principles is that “a solitary human being is a contradiction in terms” (Tutu: 2011). We can only realize our own humanity through our relationships with others.

While much Western philosophy places the individual at the center of existence (think Descartes’ methodical doubt, Kant’s transcendental idealism, and the entire existentialist project), ubuntu thought structures itself around the community.

The Ghanaian theologian John S. Pobee, for example, reconstrues Descartes’ famous Latin phrase cogito ergo sum, ‘I think therefore I am’, to cognatus ergo sum, ‘I am related by blood, therefore I exist.’

There is also the Zulu phrase umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, ‘a person is a person through other persons’, and Kenyan philosopher John Mbiti’s dictum, ‘I am because we are’.

Ubuntu doesn’t extinguish the ideas of self or personal growth, it just understands them through our relationships to the wider community. As the philosopher Augustine Shutte puts it in a 2001 essay on ubuntu:

Our deepest moral obligation is to become more fully human. And this means entering more and more deeply into community with others. So although the goal is personal fulfilment, selfishness is excluded.

In other words, the self is fundamentally relational, and so its growth and flourishing depends on the growth and flourishing of its relations.

Ubuntu thus reorients our conception of things like health, wealth, and success away from the individual to look at the broader community in which the individual plays a relational part. As the scholar Eric K. Yamamoto remarks in a 1997 essay:

Ubuntu is the idea that no one can be healthy when the community is sick. Ubuntu says I am human only because you are human. If I undermine your humanity, I dehumanise myself.

Consider the context of a loving family. If a particular member of the family enters a challenging period, it impacts the lived experience of all other members, who will generally do anything in their power to lend help and support.

Ubuntu extends this natural family-like responsibility and care to the wider community. By exhibiting compassion, generosity, and kindness in our dealings with others — by identifying with and standing for those with whom we live — we cultivate our fundamental humanity.

What does it mean to be wealthy?

It’s unlikely an ubuntu-inspired culture will replace the individualism of western societies any time soon, and as with any normative theory we should be careful not to romanticize the philosophy as some kind of utopian answer to all of life’s ills.

But if you, like me, find yourself living in a society so total in its obsession with self, so unrelenting in its scrutiny of individualistic metrics like private wealth, status, and power, then sometimes it’s a relief simply to remember that other ways of being human are available.

Ubuntu emphasizes not our bank accounts but our relationships as the most fundamental thing about us. We only come into existence because of others, we only survive because of others, and we can only thrive through exchanges with others.

Perhaps, then, beneath the belching mists of a rampant global consumerism that feeds off our personal vanities, the most important measure of wealth is and always will be the quality of our relationships.

We could have all the time and money in the world, but if we had no community to share it with, we’d likely feel very poor indeed.

This line of thinking might bring to mind the passage from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, in which the ‘mysterious visitor’ critiques the most pernicious forms of individualism:

He [who] accumulates wealth in solitude, thinking: how strong, how secure I am now… does not see, madman as he is, that the more he accumulates, the more he sinks into suicidal impotence… Everywhere now the human mind has begun laughably not to understand that a man’s true security lies not in his own solitary effort, but in the general wholeness of humanity.

Just like the mysterious visitor advocating social solidarity, ubuntu philosophy offers a stark alternative to the self-centered way of life.

Flourishing only happens to those who uphold and are upheld by others, ubuntu tells us.

After all, we each entered life not as savvy money spinners, but as vulnerable new members of a miraculous human community, in dire need of love, support, and care.

A truly rich life — a life in accord with nature — thus probably isn’t achieved through endless private accumulation. Perhaps the most valuable investment we can possibly make is our investment in others.

Thinking in line with ubuntu helps us see that we ease the problems of self not when we give into its egoistic fears and insecurities, but when we escape its confines, get out into the world, and connect as much as we can to those around us. Just as we were born to do.

What do you make of ubuntu?

• Do you think it’s helpful to approach life through the lens of ‘we’ rather than ‘I’?
• Does ubuntu provide relief from the more extreme ends of individualism?
• Would you prefer to live in an individualistic or collectivist culture? Could there be a happy medium between the two?​
• What does wealth mean to you?

To inform your answers, you might enjoy the following related articles:

• ​Beyond Money: Martha Nussbaum on Living a Flourishing Human Life​
• ​Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance Summary: Become Your Own Person​
• ​True Wealth Lies in Friendship: Epicurus and Ho Kepos​
• ​Fyodor Dostoevsky and Olaf Stapledon on True Security​
• ​Seneca On Coping with the Shortness of Life

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