Where are we? How did we get here?

“Men and ages which serve life by judging and destroying a past are always dangerous and endangered men and ages.  For since we are the outcome of earlier generations, we are also the outcome of their aberrations, passions and errors, and indeed of their crimes; it is not possible wholly to free oneself from this chain.  If we condemn these aberrations and regard ourselves as free of them, this does not alter the fact that we originate in them.  The best we can do is to confront our inherited and hereditary nature with our knowledge, and through a new, stern discipline combat our inborn heritage and implant in ourselves a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that our first nature withers away.  It is an attempt to give oneself, as it were a posteriori, a past in which one would like to originate in opposition to that in which one did originate: — always a dangerous attempt because it is so hard to know the limit of denial of the past and because second natures are usually weaker than the first.  What happens all to often is that we know the good but do not do it, because we also know the better but cannot do it.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (trans. Hollingdale)