What Makes Humans Tick
The most pressing question concerning the planet and any state or organization of life on it is of course the question of humans, who have dominated the environment for centuries and expanded their empire of dominion relentlessly on an accelerating curve.
And the most pressing issue about humans themselves is what makes them tick and why they take the actions they do.
I would submit for consideration that any human can be found on a broad spectrum of mental states that hinge on his (or her) ability to be rational in the present.  Above that hinge-point, the individual becomes more and more fully aware of things as they are now, and contemplates the present and the future.  
Below that hinge-point, the individual leaves more and more of the present on automatic and has his actual attention more and more embedded in past events, with the result that his calculations and estimations are less and less connected with actual vectors of change in the moment, and less and less accurate as a result. Complexity, disruption, layers of alteration and excuses increase as one goes south.
Most of us are in a region of clarity near that hinge-point or center region , able to be more or less in the present but, on the other hand, constantly being invited to let our attention drift into areas of the past where uncertainty, absence of closure of some kind, regret, loss, unresolved fury, or deep apathy serve to make us less competent and capable than we are.  Sometimes we're a little further "north" of the hinge-point, able to see the future more clearly, act more dynamically and more rationally, and other times we are a little further south than that, dragged down by unidentified past emotional and mental thrusts from times that no longer exist (except to the degree we keep on reconstructing them).
Getting out of the gray zone in the middle, the north bound side of this equation is to a greater and greater degree concerned with future well being.  Getting out of the gray zone, the south bound side is more and more concerned with bringing about destruction in one or another form.  
But this is not the way it seems to the driver.  Both sides of this spectrum tend to be perfectly justified and rationalized. The husband who leads his marriage into destruction by starting a series of affairs, or by hitting the bottle, will tell you at every moment along the way that what he is doing is "right" for various reasons, and the explanations will be as ready and as facile as the stories about checks in the mail from a tenant down on his luck.
It is very interesting that both sides of this spectrum believe (at least superficially) that they are going forward.  Like the engine of a vehicle that continues to run in the same direction whether the gears are in forward or reverse, the difference between forward and backward seems almost undetectable to the operators, sometimes.
The core equation in both regions is still being fulfilled, just as the engine on the car is still going around clockwise.  And that core equation is what makes people tick.
The core equation is to bring about future for whatever one sees as oneself, one's proxies, one's allies and symbiotes, and one's symbols.  Building a future for a company at which one works is bringing about a future for one's own symbiotes and allies.  That future may be toward growth (n the north end of the spectrum) or toward contraction, dispersal, and collapse on the south end.  To the operator, unless his or her attention is strongly directed to look, the fact that these are opposite directions will not seem evident, because of the screens of justification and the terrible deep urge to be right even when steering toward failure.
The impulse to bring about future may be applied to families, to companies, towns, tribes, nations, or races.  It may be applied to beasts and birds and flowers and vegetables, estimated as symbiotes to one's own groups.  It may be applied to the whole species, or other species on which ours depends, or material frames or manufacturing tools or space exploration; but behind it all is his singular drive: let there be future for me, my symbiotes, my proxies, my allies, and my symbols. This drive for living into the future directly or indirectly is the core engine of all human transaction.
The art of doing this well, of course, depends on recognizing the difference between north and south.
And thereby hangs a tale.