E.O. Wilson has a book called The Social Conquest of Earth in which he argues that humans form a 'superorganism'. He believes group-level selection has helped shape it. In other people's work on the evolutionary origins of multicellularity, which occurred independently multiple times, they argue that single celled organisms go through evolutionary stages where they first form a colony, then the individual cells specialize, then there is an alignment of fitness of the single celled organism with the multicelled progenitor, (might be called a superorganism at this stage) then an 'export of fitness' phase where the organisms transition to obligate multicellularity. Its interesting to think of humans as being in the midst of playing out this same sequence of phases, and that the next threshold for us is to become like individual cells in a single body. 

Interesting, Lowell. Maybe some people are the equivalents of specialized tissues. Organizations of like-minded people are organs. You all are neural tissue. Universities are brains. My Midwestern in-laws are connective tissue. The police are the immune system.

One thing that intrigues me is that from the perspective of a single cell, the whole body would seem like a god - so much more powerful than the individual cell as to seem omnipotent, so much more intelligent as to seem omniscient. Compared to competing and struggling as a single-celled organism, being protected and cared for as part of a multicelled body would seem like a heaven.