Nietzsche saw it first. The figure he called the Last Man, that hollow creature who blinks and asks what love is, who has invented happiness and no longer knows what to do with it, was not merely a philosophical curiosity. It was a prophecy. Francis Fukuyama, writing in 1992 at the peak of Western triumphalism, transplanted this vision into political theory, warning that the final victory of liberal democracy might produce not a race of gods but a race of contented livestock, stripped of the megalothymia that had animated every civilization worthy of the name. Dr. Charles Cornish-Dale’s The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity accepts Fukuyama’s framework and does something bold with it. He extends the argument downward, from the metaphysical to the biological, insisting that the Last Man is not an abstraction but a physiological fact, a creature produced by chemicals, processed food, and hormonal collapse. The book is provocative, rich in data, and in places genuinely unsettling. It is also, as this review will argue, both right and partially wrong in ways that complicate its conclusions without invalidating them.
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The philosophical spine of the argument concerns thymos, that Greek concept of spiritedness or warm-bloodedness that Plato identified as the seat of a man’s desire for recognition and distinction. Thymos drives men toward competition, toward the assertion of individual worth, toward what Fukuyama calls megalothymia: the refusal to be merely equal, the hunger to be better. Liberal democracy, by definitional commitment to isothymia, the insistence that all men are equal, cannot accommodate the full expression of megalothymia. The Last Man, the end product of this political settlement, is therefore a creature who has given up prideful belief in his own superior worth in favor of comfortable self-preservation. He has no Promethean spirit, no will to dominate nature or his circumstances, no sense of purpose that extends beyond the trivial pleasures of work as a form of entertainment—lest it be too harrowing—consumption, and leisure. Cornish-Dale’s contribution is to argue that this metaphysical condition has a biological corollary: thymos, for all intents and purposes, is testosterone.
This equation is not merely rhetorical. Throughout history, the men who remade the world were men of ferocious agency, eccentricity, and individualism. Isaac Newton, working in near total isolation, deviated so completely from the prevailing traditions of his day that his Principia reads less like a contribution to an ongoing debate than an intervention from a different order of mind. John Rockefeller imposed his organizational will on an industry so chaotic that a hundred competitors had failed to tame it, and by sheer force of systematic thinking and will, created a corporate structure that became the template for industrial modernity. Civilization, in its most consequential movements, has been advanced by men who refused the comfort of the norm, who possessed the peculiar combination of agentic drive, individualism, and creative eccentricity and fullness of vision that made them capable of breakthroughs others could not even imagine. This is not sentiment or myth or naïve wishfulness about the past. It is the historical record. The book implicitly understands that this is a work about civilization itself, and that any sustained decline in the biological substrate of male vitality is therefore a civilizational emergency.
The empirical case for that decline is presented with considerable rigor. The Massachusetts Male Aging Study, a gold-standard population-based study of 1,709 healthy men conducted across three waves from 1987 to 2004, found that both total and bioavailable testosterone fell by over 20 percent in less than 20 years, reductions that could not be explained by confounding factors like obesity or smoking. Researchers in Finland, examining three large population samples totaling twice the MMAS cohort, found serum testosterone in men aged 60 to 69 fell from 21.9 nmol/L in those born between 1913 and 1922, to 13.8 nmol/L in those born between 1942 and 1951, a 37 percent decrease in approximately 30 years. Furthermore, a Danish study of 5,000 men found that those born in the 1960s had, on average, 14 percent less testosterone than men of the same age born in the 1920s. Similarly, an Israeli study from 2020 found a highly significant independent decline in total testosterone across the first two decades of the 21st century. The pattern is consistent, crosses national boundaries, and cannot be attributed to lifestyle choices alone.
What gives these numbers human texture is Cornish-Dale’s use of personal testimony from Reddit communities dedicated to low testosterone—particularly, r/lowT. The men who write there are not philosophizing about thymos. They are describing what it feels like to have the animating force drained from their lives. One individual reports suicidal ideation, total absence of motivation, an inability to summon any drive to compete, zero interest in sex, and a pervasive passivity that leaves him incapable even of making routine decisions. Another describes years of depression, fatigue, and weight gain that every doctor he visited dismissed as lifestyle problems, never ordering a blood test. These men are not the victims of ideological manipulation or cultural malaise. They are physiological casualties, men whose endocrine systems have failed them so comprehensively that existence itself becomes a burden. Their testimonies put a face on the statistical abstractions of population studies and underscore what Cornish-Dale means when he says the Last Man is not a cultural archetype but a biological reality.
The mechanism Cornish-Dale implicates most forcefully is endocrine disruption. A class of synthetic chemicals that interfere with the body’s hormonal balance, endocrine disruptors are now so ubiquitous in food, water, personal-care products, and consumer plastics that there is effectively no escape from exposure. Bisphenol A, present in everything from food can linings to thermal paper receipts, was identified as estrogenic in the 1930s and is now detectable in virtually every human body that is tested. Chinese factory workers with measurable BPA in their urine were found to be more than four times as likely to have lower sperm counts than those with undetectable levels. Phthalates, used in plastic products, vinyl coverings, and personal-care products like perfume and cologne, have been shown to reduce testosterone and compromise sperm quality through multiple pathways.
Then there is the matter of atrazine, the herbicide at the center of what Cornish-Dale rightly calls Alex Jones’s vindication. Jones was widely mocked for his 2015 claim that chemicals in the water supply were turning frogs gay, but the science behind the rant was sounder than his detractors allowed. Biologist Tyrone Hayes and colleagues at Berkeley exposed African clawed frog larvae to atrazine and found that the herbicide reduced testicular volume, reduced sperm count, induced hermaphroditism, lowered testosterone, and triggered the development of female reproductive cells in male frogs. Approximately 80 million pounds of atrazine are applied annually in the United States, making it the most common pesticide contaminant of ground and surface water, and it has been detected in rainfall more than 1,000 kilometers from its application sites. What happens in amphibians under concentrated laboratory conditions is not identical to what happens in humans at ambient exposure levels, but the biological mechanism is real, and the plausibility of effects on the human endocrine system is no longer a fringe position.
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Most significant of all is the direct evidence linking endocrine disruption to transgenderism. A study published in the Journal of Xenobiotics, examining the effects of diethylstilbestrol on a cohort of French boys, found that those exposed to DES in utero were as much as 100 times more likely to become male-to-female transgenders than the highest reported background rate in Europe. DES was given to about four million American women during pregnancy from 1938 to 1971 as a treatment for miscarriage risk. It has since been linked to undescended testicles, micropenises, ectopic pregnancies, rare cancers, and a range of psychological disorders, including schizophrenia and eating disorders. Its effects are multigenerational. The DES study offers what Cornish-Dale calls a bombshell: direct biological evidence, not cultural speculation, that the rise in transgender identification correlates with measurable chemical exposure. Jones’s commentary on the gay frogs may have been cruder than the science warrants, but his intuition about the direction of causation was not mistaken.
The dietary argument reinforces the hormonal one. Cornish-Dale finds in Socrates a surprising ally. In the Republic, Plato’s Socrates describes a simple vegetarian community as the “true” society, healthy and at peace, while noting that permitting meat transforms it into a feverish, expansionary polity that requires guardians and generates war. What Socrates was really describing, Cornish-Dale suggests, was the relationship between diet, testosterone, and thymos. Research confirms the intuition: the worst possible diet for maintaining optimal hormone levels is a low-fat vegetarian diet, which has been shown to reduce testosterone by over 26 percent, almost certainly because testosterone depends on saturated fat and cholesterol as precursor molecules. Plant proteins are less complete than animal proteins, deficient in essential amino acids, and harder for the body to absorb. Sixty percent of adult vegans and 40 percent of adult vegetarians are estimated to have a B12 deficiency, a shortfall linked to infertility, mental illness, and neurological damage. The push for a global transition to plant-based diets, endorsed by the World Economic Forum, the EAT-Lancet Commission, and the broader Great Reset agenda, is therefore not merely an agricultural or environmental policy. It is, in Cornish-Dale’s estimation, a mechanism for biochemical demobilization of male vitality on a civilizational scale.
One ought to register a complication, however, not to diminish the book but to strengthen the analysis it invites. Testosterone may not be the whole story. Some research conducted in the United States has suggested that sperm quality metrics and testosterone levels in certain populations have shown modest improvement or stabilization in recent years, and the picture across the full body of reproductive literature is less uniformly catastrophic than the most alarming projections suggest. Trends vary by geography, age cohort, and methodology, and the causal structure of the decline remains contested enough that a degree of epistemic caution is warranted even when the broad pattern is accepted.
Cornish-Dale is certainly right that the vitality of men is necessary for civilization, and he is brave to attribute social changes to biology at a moment when that move is deeply unfashionable. The causal mechanism, though, may be more complex than a single hormonal story. Writers in the tradition of Edward Dutton, Peter Frost, and William Blau have argued for some years that the genomic quality of Western populations has been quietly deteriorating, and that this process predates the modern chemical onslaught. The argument runs as follows: natural selection, for most of human history, enforced a pitiless cull of individuals who lacked the physical, cognitive, or temperamental qualities necessary for survival and reproduction. The Industrial Revolution broke this mechanism. Improvements in living standards, nutrition, sanitation, and medical technology allowed individuals who in previous centuries would have died in infancy or early adulthood to survive to reproductive age and pass on their genetic material. Evolution is a slow process, and populations do not adapt to a sudden removal of selective pressure in a generation or two. The social crises visible today, the epidemic of anxiety and purposelessness, the retreat from manhood, the collapse in male ambition, may therefore represent not merely a hormonal emergency but the cumulative expression of a multigenerational softening in the genomic substrate of civilization itself. Chemicals accelerate and exacerbate this trajectory, but they are not the origin of social decay.
This possibility does not invalidate Cornish-Dale’s diagnosis, but deepens it. If the genomic floor is already declining and endocrine disruptors are simultaneously reducing the hormonal ceiling, the combined effect on male vitality is worse than either factor alone would suggest. The policy implications may also differ. Banning BPA and cleaning up water supplies can be legislated in a decade. Reversing the genomic consequences of a century and a half of dysgenic selection is a problem of an entirely different order, one that touches questions most contemporary institutions are not prepared to address honestly. Cornish-Dale’s book belongs to a tradition of uncomfortable inquiry that has been gaining momentum precisely because the mainstream alternatives have proved inadequate. Whether the solution lies in biology, politics, diet, or some combination of all three, the question the book poses is the right one: without the Promethean fire of masculine vitality, what exactly is civilization for?
