No offense taken at all. You may not have gotten it, because it probably isn’t explained fully (or even realized fully by him) until his second book, which I like much more. Whereas ZMM is an inquiry into values, Lila is an inquiry into morals, and is where he lays out his metaphysics of quality. Plenty of people think it’s garbage, but I’ve yet to see someone take it apart, which is why I asked the original question of you.

You used the phrase, evolutionary forces in your explanation. To him, that’s quality.

The force that compelled the amoeba to move towards nutrients and away from danger is quality.

In Lila, written for something like 15 years after ZMM was published, he posits that quality can be broken into 2 essential forms: Dynamic quality and static quality. They basically correlate to liberalism and conservatism. In his mind, both are essential for evolutionary progress and are the source of all that is.

Dynamic quality is often random, unconventional, and disruptive. It’s some wild mutation that ends up being a positive, or some rogue actor who ends up birthing a movement for good. It is essential to progress beyond what is currently.

Static quality is all that is good currently. It’s the breadth of learned knowledge. It’s the safety of what’s gotten us this far. Abandoning it entirely is a recipe for chaos and potentially great loss.

In his estimation, the combination of these 2 forms of quality is what makes evolution work, and he believes humans are not the highest expression of evolution.

He outlines levels of the world that are conquered in the name of progress and that each one supersedes the one before it.

The first level is non-living matter. It’s just there, not doing much. The second is biological. It bends the non-living stuff to its will.

The next level is social. It uses the living stuff for its benefit. The good of the whole outweighs the good of the individuals. People are to the society like food is to people. They power it, create it, become it, and it carries on after they’re gone.

He uses the example of New York, consuming human productivity for its own benefit. Feasting on humans to grow bigger and stronger, and shitting them out the other side.

The final level, as he sees it, is intellectual. Ideas supersede the societies. They bend them to their will. The idea that slaves should be free is strong enough to risk destruction of the society.

His ethics is based on these levels. At the biological level, sex is always quality. At the societal level, the wrong sex can threaten the community / society and becomes more nuanced, only quality sometimes. Society > biology. At the intellectual level, slavery is bad, even though it results in strong communities and cities and has many benefits.

My plane is taking off, so I finished that off poorly, but read Lila is that’s at all intriguing. It’s my favorite book.