*Yawn*

Basically you're just restating & expanding a free will vs fate, or nurture vs nature.

Yes people make choices; but to ignore that those choices are often HUGELY influenced by the surrounding society, and that there are things/forces/entities which specifically corral or funnel -- or alternately tempt and entice -- people into certain choices and behaviors (things they otherwise might not choose or do)... well that demonstrates to me that you are either incredibly naive, or incredibly full of yourself.

I'll just leave this here.

You are FAR less a "creation of your own mind" than you think -- and that includes your opinions, & your beliefs as much (if not more) than the clothing you wear, the songs you listen to, books and movies you read and watch, etc -- you are in fact VERY MUCH a creature that was "shaped" (and "distorted") by the things around you... you were "indoctrinated" into a worldview (or a very LIMITED series of worldviews, set before you as if they were some "menu", and then various pressures & influences were applied {including some rather sophisticated psychological and reverse-psychological "trickery"} to get you to essentially "make" the choices for you).

As Graham noted in the above essay:

We may imagine that we are a great deal smarter and more virtuous than past generations, but the more history you read, the less likely this seems. People in past times were much like us. Not heroes, not barbarians. Whatever their ideas were, they were ideas reasonable people could believe.

One must remember that we are dealing with collectives of fully grown adults when we are discussing issues of men, women, and the environment.

Yes and yet no. Humans in "collective" form are far from simply an aggregate of individually thinking/choosing individuals. In fact, in even relatively small "collective" groups*, they essentially QUIT thinking and begin behaving like "herd animals".

Understanding that FACT, that REALITY, is not "stripping away their 'agency' from them" -- rather it is comprehending that they have CHOSEN to abandon their own "agency" and follow the herd.

* This "herd" behavior -- where individual thinking/choice is abandoned -- can often be seen in groups even as few as 3 or 4 people; and becomes far more common once the group passes a dozen or more; and increases until it becomes the "default" behavior once the numbers increase past say 50 people and much more so when it reaches into the hundreds, thousands or millions.