Western individualism and ubuntu

In many of my readings concerning psychoanalysis, I keep coming across this expression: "The depressive position."

Upon reflection, I wonder whether this term is key to enscapsulating the difference between how most Westerners experience their own consciousness, and the way I experienced life growing up.

I've spent 12 years delving for useful ethnographic information in my autobiography, and I can honestly say that at least for the first 16 years of my life I experienced nothing of envious competitiveness with any of my friends.

It wasn't that I was of such superlative character than I simply rose above that. Rather, my life was just immensely full -- and somehow the antics of my friends only added to that sense of fullness rather than detracting from it.

On a related matter, I have very often wondered how it could be that people brought up in Western culture -- people who often have a much more subtle and refined version of right and wrong that the ones that I was brought up with -- tend to put up with so much seemingly open malice directed against them.

Could it be that the answer is linked to the proximity in experience of the depressive position (being resigned to the world of objects and objectification)? Maybe a lot of people cannot bear to admit the truth of how little they are worth to others, or how flimsy the underpinnings of their social positions are. Such recognition would cause them to plunge into despair -- an acceptance of their lack of subjective value in an objective world.

Perhaps I never felt this way, because my conception of the social world was collectivist, rather than individualist. With me, it was more a feeling of, "I rise and fall with my tribe. And if something bad happens to me, it can be balanced to some degree by something good happening to someone else."

This kind of approach to life gives one a certain robustness. I find that these days I have transitioned back almost entirely to viewing the world according to this earlier engendered perspective. One lives many lives vicariously in this way, and if something personally bad happens, it seems relatively minor (compared to if I have the mindset that I am competing strongly as an individual -- of course I am still competing, only differently).

One can also experience more of the highs and lows of life, this way, without feeling like the world has to come to an end.

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From Wiki:

Ubuntu: "I am what I am because of who we all are." (From a translation offered by Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee.)

Archbishop Desmond Tutu offered a definition in a 1999 book:[3]

A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, based from a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.
Tutu further explained Ubuntu in 2008:[4]

One of the sayings in our country is Ubuntu – the essence of being human. Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can't exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness. You can't be human all by yourself, and when you have this quality – Ubuntu – you are known for your generosity. We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole World. When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of humanity.
Nelson Mandela explained Ubuntu as follows:[5]

A traveller through a country would stop at a village and he didn't have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu, but it will have various aspects. Ubuntu does not mean that people should not enrich themselves. The question therefore is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to be able to improve?