Hormonal Health
The Evil Testosterone
Testosterone isn't evil—it's essential for performance, motivation, and health. Why declining testosterone levels represent an underestimated societal problem.
Hormonal Health
Testosterone isn't evil—it's essential for performance, motivation, and health. Why declining testosterone levels represent an underestimated societal problem.
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-- This newsletter's contents apply to women too! They also have testosterone --
Testosterone has come to represent evil in our society.
Sure: we associate it with large, fast cars and meat consumption ("environmental pollution!"), machismo ("misogyny!"), brash behavior ("authoritarianism!"), power and competition ("oppression!"), and mental toughness ("lack of empathy!"). In short, if you're looking for a villain, it's surely the "old white man" in a leadership position who, with the last shred of testosterone, embodies the very incarnation of evil.
But testosterone isn't a hormone that makes people evil or worse. Quite the opposite. Testosterone is indeed the driving force behind any societal progress, because at the physiological level it's what makes active progress possible in the first place—for instance, by exerting massive influence on dopamine in the brain. Put simply, whoever lacks sufficient testosterone literally has no drive for life, no appetite for competition (= the prerequisite for development!), and instead asks themselves every day how to manage their existential despair.
One of our readers expressed this well—someone who apparently experienced a testosterone boost during a dietary shift (away from veganism). He writes plainly and directly:
You're no longer a man. You feel, despite looking healthy, like a limp noodle. At the gym, progress stops. And (marital) duties are perceived as actual duties rather than "Hell yes, let's go!"
Got it? Without testosterone, you can only look up from below instead of down from above. To put it bluntly, you transform from "perpetrator" to "victim." A sentence on Wikipedia stands out in this context: Behavioral-biological effects in animals have been researched and observed, including display behavior, combat behavior, courtship, and sexual drive. This was demonstrated, among other things, through castration and subsequent hormone administration to animals—aggressive stallions become docile, adapted geldings.
Fortunately, we're human, not horses or other animals. But who wants to be a docile, adapted gelding? Studies show that testosterone values have declined steadily for many decades—according to a 2007 study, by about 1% annually. A recent 2021 US study measures a 30% drop in testosterone median among teenagers and young adults over the past two decades. Sperm count has halved over the past 40 years—genital organs increasingly show malformations. Researchers discovering such things urgently call out to us: "We need to change!"
Anthropologist Peter McAllister called the modern man in his 2012 book Manthropology "the sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens to ever walk the planet". The fact is, nobody really knows why there's such a dramatic collapse of masculinity. A 1994 SPIEGEL article spoke of an "ocean of hormones" in connection with increasing environmental pollution from estrogen-like environmental substances, and describes, among other things, "impotent panthers, transsexual fish, alligators with shriveled penises" in the animal world. Is that the reason? We don't know.
Beyond testosterone's enormous psychological effects on humans, testosterone also shows strong physiological effects on all organ systems:
Testosterone has many other effects. In short: testosterone isn't some toy you either have or don't. The effects of this hormone are so enormous on an individual and societal level that we should really reflect on what a collective testosterone decline means for society. It's certainly nothing to be proud of. And it's certainly no sign of social progress if a country is full of castrated geldings—though that would be a simplification anyway, since women need this hormone too and benefit similarly. You learn something new every day, right?
Yes, these lines may have been a bit too harsh for some sensibilities. But the facts need to be stated. It's simply the truth. And that truth is frightening.
We need to change! We must change ourselves. Right now.
What that really means, well, one could write books about it. Oh wait, that's already happened several times. Perhaps worth reading again in "Optimize Health, Increase Performance". Because this book in this form and from this publisher won't exist much longer.
