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Depends on what you are talking about.
Morals - The universal (society’s norms and laws) is higher. For example, if we put the individual (self) above the universal we sin and will continue to sin unless we remove the individual from above the universal. An example would be if our society decides that stealing is bad and we steal for individual reasons then we would have put the individual above the universal and we would have sinned against that society. So in a sense, yes, the universal is higher than the individual but once you get into post-Conventional morals it gets more complicated.
If you want to go farther and you believe in religion you can say the spiritual is above both the individual and universal. Usually what happens (in stories) is that the spiritual will take form as the individual and then it will pass above the universal. For example, the story with Abraham in the Bible. God told him to kill his only son even though killing his son was against that societies standards, he was going to still going to go through with it since the spiritual is considered higher than the universal.
DanaC summed up community living and making yourself part of bigger picture. I will expand on it by saying an ideal can be higher than self. People will sacrifice themselves for ideals, freedom for example, so that would be considered higher than self.
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