Questions like this highlight the practical character of the taxonomies/theories we construct. It seems like a very strange and maybe stupid question if you are

Questions like this highlight the practical character of the taxonomies/theories we construct. It seems like a very strange and maybe stupid question if you are thinking along the lines of, "is society really an organism after all?"—but if instead you just wonder if it would be useful to consider society as an organism, you may find it has enough shared properties to make the designation appropriate, which in turn allows you to borrow certain known things about other organisms and apply them to societies. On this specific question, I think 'organism' comes with too many additional properties not possessed by societies. But, I would not be surprised to find that it's useful to class societies as being the same types of things as minds. For instance, minds and societies both do a kind of decision making (e.g., electing a president). There's a temptation to say that it was just the humans doing the decision making—but a more objective view is that decision making is something that happens in human minds (the human didn't do it—the neurons did! —no, the molecules did!). Of course all sorts of difficulties may arise, and we're already bumping up against claims on free will... Seems like a fruitful thing to think about though.