Society consists of institutions and organizations such as family, government, business, and educational and religious institutions and organizations. Two conditions are necessary for people to be happy in social institutions and organizations.
The first condition is for individuals’ happiness to be protected and promoted. Individuals in institutions and organizations should be able to achieve happiness as a member of the group they belong to. They need to feel satisfied and happy and need something they can get immersed into and work on for self-actualization. They may pursue meanings or values or both in each institution and organization. Most institutions and organizations except for family provide conditions for pursuing values rather than meanings. Members of family exchange emotions with one another pursuing love and happiness, but members of other institutions and organizations usually do not and are not supposed to exchange emotions as family members do.
The second condition is for each institution or organization to have a clearly defined goal of itself. Human beings pursue their own values in relationships with other people in institutions and organizations. There are three types of values to be pursued in human social groups. They are economic, relational, and social values. When you pursue economic values, your goal is to achieve economic success. When you pursue relational values, your goal is to achieve social positions, honor, recognition, or fame. When you pursue social values, your goal is to better the society and make other people happy. All social groups need to pursue only one primary value among the three. When a social group pursues more than one value simultaneously, it will end up damaging its structure, operation, and outcome. In such cases, the damage is proportional to the size of the social group. All members of an institution or organization can become happy when they all work together to achieve a clearly defined goal of the group based on individuals’ happiness.
If an individual pursues meanings instead of values in a social group other than one’s family, or the social group does not have a clearly defined goal among the three types of values, the social group will fail and its members will become unhappy. When an institution and organization pursues economic value but an individual in the group pursues social value, conflicts occur between the two making the group unsuccessful and the individual unhappy. When the group and individuals in the group work for the same goal, individuals can generate passion and achieve happiness within themselves and the group can make progress and become successful. Most conventional educational programs adopted by institutions and organizations to train their members aim for raising productivity disregarding concepts of pursuit of meanings and values, self-actualization, and happiness in mind. When individuals pursue different values from the values of the group, the improved productivity may not contribute to the success of the group.
Institutions and organizations have individual members as their fundamental constituents, so individuals’ psychological conditions greatly affect the operation and outcome of the group. When individuals in a group with great passion and ability cannot heal stress and treat wounds properly, other individuals and the whole group will be adversely affected. When individuals develop psychological disorders due to untreated stress and wounds, they may destroy human relationships within the group and focus only on their own selfish goal and desire at the expense of others’ rights and happiness.
It is also very important that individuals’ pursuit of values and meanings should be protected within the group. It is the group’s responsibility for its members. When institutions and organizations fail to protect and promote members’ pursuit of values and meanings, members may develop psychological problems distorting the pursuit of meanings and values or have to leave the group to protect themselves.
The collapse of the group can cause the collapse of its members and vice versa. Institutions and organizations that do not protect and promote individuals’ self-actualization cannot but fail eventually. Both individual members and those who are in charge of operating institutions and organizations must accurately understand the concept of self-actualization with meanings and values and its effects on individuals’ happiness and the groups’ success. The more the concept of human happiness is understood and adopted by individuals and groups, the more happiness and prosperity will spread in the society.
