Shared Experiences and Solidarity Goods

Shared Experiences and Solidarity Goods Name Institution Shared Experiences and Solidarity Goods Human beings tend to engage in interactive activities or social functions through which they express their sense of belonging to a given identity. The identities develop or build from a wide range of sources including a person’s cultural background, race, ethnicity, and even nationality. However, the outlined sources form a broader perspective of the concept of human identity as human beings are known to have come together on much less than the ties of cultural, racial, or ethnic commonalities. People come to a common understanding that cuts across their differences of identity through shared experiences of what they perceive evoke either positive or negative emotions on either the majority or a mere minority of the society. The American Civil rights movement, for instance, sought to address the social, political, and economic injustices facing a minority group of the United States community. Nevertheless, the campaign received support from other members of the larger community that did not share the racial identity of African Americans. Participants from the majority group of the Whites and others from the other social groups simply shared a common factor of indifference to the plight of the oppressed African Americans. Events that bring people together to share their pain, remorse, or distaste against a social, political, or economic problem in society display the existence of an unconscious social glue through which cooperation builds among the group. The protest for equal rights and justice form just one of the social bonds cutting across the social or political divides as there exist more events of lesser extremes where individuals come together to share or have a good time enjoying what they find to be fun irrespective of the differences in identity. The fun activities or events, however, only seem to last for a short while as people tend to create several celebratory moments in their lives with some being more memorable than the others. In essence, events where people come together for celebration and in those where people come together to share their pain provide the social glue upon which cooperation builds among the gathering individuals. However, it is the events characterized by the expression of negative emotions such as pain or mourning events that tend to build stronger ...