Adaptation.

As Spinoza pointed out, we humans are not free. But we can and should seek the causes of our predestination. At the time, ideas were largely focused on some external omnipotent entity. And two centuries passed before Darwin was able to understand that life in general and us humans in particular exist because we have adapted to changing circumstances. Then Freud came to the conclusion that hidden (subconscious) memories influence our thoughts, our acts and our metabolisms. And Elias Canetti realized that large human groups have a psychology of their own. Meanwhile, Adam Smith explained that work produces the wealth divided up among nations (and nationals). And Marx claimed that events are the result of a historic class struggle over this very division. And Keynes argued that money is a fiction maintained by social consent. And Friedman replied that, fiction or not, money is primordial. Whereas Reich dared to affirm that frustrated eroticism makes us dangerously ill. And Alice Miller described the destructive effect of the parent-child relationship. At the same time, McLuhan perceived that media have their own hot or cold message. While Lorenz and Wynne-Edwards both concluded that our mutual adaptation makes animal and human behaviour quite similar. And Germaine Greer dissected the sociology of sex. And...
The causes are there for us to comprehend. We do what we do, because we must. Our personal and collective past, the rules of society, our genes, they all bind us to a predestined path. And so it is with individuals, so it is with humanity as a whole. Over the past forty years, it has become increasingly obvious that humans are stretching their exceptional adaptability to the limits. Our world is about as synthetic as it can get. Our environment has become essentially prosthetic. And the iron rule of history is that there is no going back.
We can’t go back and we just as certainly can’t stop, but another course still seems conceivable. The track we are on is the result of what we are. And yet all the causes structuring our beings are modifiable. Even the primary genetic causes show we can be something else. There are no eternal laws out there to which we must submit. There is just change, and adaptation or extinction.