Beliefs in determinism, or stronger yet, predestination, could be understood as crystallized ideological relics of the basic reality that we possess an inner, denser emotional/experiential core that although at times malleable, is a little more difficult to alter with conscious effort. It tends to take the white hot early stages of child development to give shape to the core, and after that it can be banged into other shapes with a good enough wallop, say a traumatic or ecstatic event.
And then conscious effort can be put towards various methods of altering the thing too, albeit in a more gradual, deliberate, and incremental manner, but then even the conscious effort itself has to rest on a deeper, denser emotional and spiritual commitment, which itself is often forged through more powerful external cultural and historical forces.
People can go through all sorts of material metamorphoses, and pass vast temporal and geographical distances and remain themselves. But they can change too; to what extent however seems to rely more on large, persuasive, external circumstances, in which peers, communities, institutions, nations, historical periods, etc. are changing with them. Though these changes are nevertheless composed of the changing individuals themselves.
