Preventing the Distortion of Ideals: Organizational Ethics, Constraints on Power, and Self-Correction in a Global Happiness Movement—From Mission Drift and Elite Entrenchment to Open Distributed Governance

Social organizations oriented toward public benefit, happiness, peace, or civilizational progress do not automatically preserve their original benevolent intentions merely because those intentions were benevolent at the beginning. As organizations expand, professionalize, accumulate resources, and gain social influence, the prestige of founders, managerial authority, dependence on funding, organizational survival needs, and member identity can gradually generate interests independent of the original mission. The distortion of ideals should therefore not be understood merely as an exceptional event caused by a few bad people entering an organization. It should be treated as a governance risk that every long-lived organization must actively confront. Building on the preceding Human Happiness Community framework and the Civic Learning and Practice Network Model proposed in Paper 12, this paper develops the Organizational Integrity and Self-Correction Model. The model identifies at least six risks that emerge when social ideals become organizations: founder personalization, elite entrenchment, resource dependence and mission drift, substitution of scale metrics for mission, closure of group identity, and dogmatization of knowledge. The task of organizational governance is not to assume that these risks will never arise, but to establish institutional conditions that can detect, constrain, disclose, and correct them before they become entrenched. Michels's classic account of oligarchical tendencies argues that as organizations become more complex and professionalized, leaders may acquire increasing autonomy through their control of information, expertise, and organizational resources. Later scholarship has substantially qualified any claim that this tendency is an irresistible iron law, but the argument remains useful as an organizational warning. Nonprofit-governance research likewise suggests that governance should not be reduced to formal boards alone but understood as a broader, multilevel, dynamic system. Ebrahim's work on NGO accountability further shows that real-world accountability often becomes stronger upward toward funders than downward toward service recipients and inward toward organizational members. On this basis, the paper argues that any future HHC practice network should institutionalize separation of powers, multidirectional accountability, financial transparency, disclosure of resource dependence, freedom of exit, protection of dissent, independent evaluation, public theory-version histories, and the possibility of organizational termination. The original manuscript already proposed safeguards such as rejecting personal cults, refusing to establish an unquestionable founder, allowing theory to be challenged, preserving revision histories, maintaining financial transparency, and protecting freedom of exit. This paper translates those principles into institutional constraints rather than relying only on the personal virtue of participants. The paper ultimately proposes a simple test: an organization oriented toward Rational Public-Regarding Good must first allow the same rational public-regarding principles to constrain itself. If an organization can survive only by hiding information, suppressing dissent, cultivating personal worship, restricting exit, or sacrificing the basic subjecthood of its members, then regardless of how noble its public slogans may be, it has already structurally deviated from its own theory.