In Metatron part one we determined that societies, more or less defined as a system of organizing human labor towards some specific end, are generally in a process of evolving towards greater self propagation abilities. The exact rules of the game are fairly static, being determined by the laws of psychics and the conditions on the current playing feild (the earth, perhaps in the future, the universe). The rules that set up this competitive process for self propagation can be called "Nature", and it is the big game that ultimately tests all of its competitors.
What is nature selecting for exactly? Essentially the ability to solve problems in order to achieve goals, specifically the type of problems that are presented to any society. Societies get more "fit" in this game as the selection process goes on and technology changes the landscape (although not the rules) of the game. We'll call this increasing metric "SPA" for "Self Propagation Ability". What constitutes SPA has been mostly, but not entirely consistent along the line of human history. The environment changes, but what constitutes a successful society never really changes all that much, though technology brings new methods of achieving this success into existence rapidly. In simplified terms, if nature were football, then the way to win is always a touchdown or a field goal, but the correct strategy for doing this changes with different sports equipment.
For the most part, SPA is determined by the organizational structure of a society, its technological development and its environmental conditions. All of these factors influence each other, with geography and environment being at the base. A society near a body of water will likely develop structures around fishing, while a society in a desert might develop structures around water management. Structures and environment influence technology and the rate of its development, and technology often changes social structures and can even modify the environment. The three play off each other and generate each other.
In Metatron part one, we discussed Metatron itself. Simply put, Metatron is self propelling productive forces which grow as a biproduct of the competitive system of SPA maximization. It can be thought of as an organism in itself. Now, with an examination of the other aspects of SPA maximization, we can see that Metatron is one part of a greater tendency. This tendency is not pushing for greater productive forces, but rather a greater average SPA for all competitors of which Metranonic productive forces are only portion. The rules of the game are Nature. The tendency, can be again visualized an an organism, a superorganism of which metatron is only a biproduct, a super organism containing the whole of "human" society, the entire techno-biological superorganism of civilization. We'll stick to calling it Civilization, a superorganism striving towards growth. It is a semi-symbiotic mesh of human structures, metatronic technological force and the unwilling exploited biosphere.
Inside the super-organism of Civilization, the subjects playing the game whose rules are Nature, are other games. Different societies, with competing humans within them, all competing according to the selector of the society they are in, and reaching different outcomes. The game of Capitalism selects for people who can win at a market system, whoever that may be, and thus encourages its players to act in ways consistent with market logic. Other systems, like feudalism and socialism, have less clear cut selectors, but they all encourage a type of behavior within their rules, namely the most successful behavior. Of course, humans are not homo economicus, and there are other factors in what they do other than what is directly incentivized by the system. They are also influenced by culture, ideology, etc. A good system will have its cultural "best choice" and its systematic "best choice" line up, and have both of them be fairly congruent with enhancing the systems SPA in the larger game. A very successful society will be able to accommodate a wide variety of goals and channel them all into increasing SPA.
A bad system is one that incentivizes behavior that is not congruent with increasing system SPA. Imagine, for instance, a kingdom in which something completely arbitrary is selected for. People who score well on grammar tests are given food and leisure time. People who score poorly are given less food and leisure time. The system rewards people who are good at writing correct grammar and encourages people to study grammar. The system works very well from the inside only. But of course, no Kingdom sits entirely alone. The game of the kingdom maximizing grammar knowledge is also a player in another game, where the winner is not who maximizes grammar knowledge but rather who maximizes SPA. Next to the kingdom of grammar knowledge maximization is the Kingdom of Gun maximization. Its structure is another simple selector. The amount of food and leisure time you get goes up with the amount of guns you manufacture. This encourages more people to make guns and become good at gun manufacture.
If these two systems went to war, who would win? Probably the system which maximizes guns. Why? Because maximizing guns has a lot more overlap with SPA than maximizing grammar knowledge does. The same dynamic happens with the various systems in real life. A feudalistic system might encourage producing more grain and food. A socialist system in the style of the USSR might encourage increasing coal production according to the quota. The game with a selection method most congruent to maximizing SPA in the larger game will be the winner.
We can visualize the whole thing as games competing within a games. We can go even a level further by imagining human beings as games. Crudely, Desires are the players within the game and some centralized selector is picking which ones end up suppressed and which ones end up making their way into consciousness and becoming actualized. The most successful humans are the ones who have a selector which is congruent with the value their society is selecting for. The less successful may indulge in desires that are not congruent with societies selection, the mentally ill may have a selector that is far away from what is selected for by society or perhaps no selector at all. We can go further, visualizing the body as a game, with the immune system acting as a selector killing off cells, etc. It all climbs back up to Nature.
For now, lets take a last look at the specifics of SPA and undercover why Capitalism has been able to shred every other system so effectively.
So what do you need to have a high SPA? You need technology and you need the structure and resources to create it. You need resources and the structure and technology to harvest it. You need structure and the technology and resources need to stick it together and hold it up. But you also need one other thing, namely intelligence.
The game you're playing is constantly changing. Internal and external problems crop up. Internal structural problems happen when structures have to be retooled to account for growth in technology or change in resource availability. External problems are everything else. Natural disasters, the need for more resources, competitor societies changing in structure, or other external limits and problems that stop maximization of SPA and Self propagation itself.
Problems present themselves. Miniature 'games' that demand a certain solution from the system. Each system has to figure out a way to allocate resources and labor towards the solving of these problems and to quickly and decisively figure out a correct solution. In feudalism and in socialism, the role for these tuneups fall almost exclusively on top down processes. In order to change the structure of society, some human must decide to do so. Wars have to be declared. Laws have to be written. Human the humans fail and the formal selector starts to fall apart, informal bottom up hacks happen, people grow gardens to cope with food shortages. Technology creates rapid onset bottom up social change. This becomes a bigger problem for the system. Values drift. The selector breaks down. The system becomes mentally ill, its selector falling away from bigger game its playing and it gets stomped.
Capitalism is not like this. Humans are still involved, but they are used more like a random number generator than a brain. The market is boiling rather than static, constantly adjusting itself at all times, infinitely plastic collective intelligence flowing into new terrain and rapidly and automatically adjusting itself to suit the new land. Bottom up hacks are incorporated into the system, tested rapidly in an inward facing simulation of nature taking the form of market logic, with the best solution spat out and adapted infinitely to various conditions. Capitalism is a generalized artificial intelligence, a game winning machine that's logic of profit is almost perfectly congruent with the maximization of SPA. Perhaps as congruent as any society above the scale of a band of barbarians could comprehend. Capitalism is smarter and better at problem solving than any system so far. With its logic of abstract labor it feeds all human time into the shredder, converting it all into abstract value which translates almost 1 to 1 with SPA.
The amazing thing about Capitalism is how fluid and intelligent its selector is. Who is Capitalism rewarding? Those who can succeed on a market. What does that mean? It depends. The exact best behavior in the market changes as the problems that need patching up change. Social space is obliterated and it becomes profitable to manufacture a marketized replacement. Resources become scarce and it becomes profitable to find replacements and substitutes. The forces of supply and demand push and pull Capital and labor from industry to industry, always allocating to where it is most needed, high profit rates acting as signals to invest more and low profit rates acting as signals that enough investment has already been done. Its self organizing, bottom up artificial intelligence, funneling human action and consumption into SPA maximization through a brute-force market based strategy. It is the Stalinist quota, but automatic, rapidly changing and uncheatable.
Another reason Capitalism works so well because it can create a proxy goal for all goals in the form of money. No matter what the goal of the individual is, it can be reduced to abstract human labor and abstract value, and the best way to achieve it is almost always congruent with SPA maximization. The grammar maximizing society tries to get you to like grammar by rewarding it. The Capitalist society doesn't much care about what you like. You can like whatever you want. It's got it in stock, and the way to get it is almost always something that helps increase the system's SPA.
So yes, Capitalism is an artificial intelligence. It could be described as Civilization allowed to govern itself for the purpose of its own advancement towards SPA and as a result, Intelligence maximization. How can we beat it? Again, we have to be better at SPA maximization than it. How can we do this? We have to figure out something smarter than it. And how can we do that? Frankly, I have no idea. But at least we can understand the problem we are facing.