Each human being is embedded in some society. Here we take the word 'society" in a wide sense and may understand by it a group of humans ranging from a family to the world population. In the following we want to study the relationship between the individual and the system from the point of view of synergetics, an approach that we shall outline below. When we consider an individual, there are two main factors that may determine his or her development. The one factor is the gene, where one extreme attitude is taken by Dawkins (Dawkins 1976) with his concept of the selfish gene. The other factor is the environment that acts on the individual in a variety of ways that we shall discuss below. Rather clearly, there is an interplay between the genetic outfit and the impact of the environment. Society being composed of individuals is by no means fixed, it behaves rather in a fluid manner. Moreover, a society does not only influence the individual, but the latter may also influence the society in a variety of ways. This leads us to the question of how we can characterize human social organization and what are the mechanisms that bring about such kind of organization. In my article I will adopt the attitude that society as well as any organism in nature underlies the laws of self-organization that have been unearthed by synergetics (Haken 1983, 1984). When dealing with complex systems, such as society, it will be a crucial task to characterize their collective features. Some manifestations of collective human behavior are certainly language and culture, but we would like to find means how to identify or characterize such collective features.