I, too, suspect changing culture is an important factor. Culture influences aims, habits, attitudes, and dispositions, and these, in turn, can mobilize biologic

I, too, suspect changing culture is an important factor. Culture influences aims, habits, attitudes, and dispositions, and these, in turn, can mobilize biological processes, like testosterone production, to adapt the body to the needs that are in principle expressed in those aims, habits, etc. However, we also have an objective need for testosterone in especially male biological processes and culture can spread deranged or deformed aims, habits, etc. that we easy to adopt and which then work to our detriment. You wouldn't say that a culture of anorexia would prove that we need to eat less. Where culture is concerned, on the one hand, we have the meathead culture of the brute that worships a frankly comical and awkward aggression and machismo. On the other hand, we have a feckless, effeminate, and cowardly culture of indirectness, agreeableness, being "nice", and getting along and at any price. Both are profoundly stupid. Aggression, anger, strength, assertiveness and so on all have their place. All are necessary. Prudence tells us when expressing one or other other is appropriate and to what degree. Virtuous habits develop these, among other qualities, within us in a healthy and normative way. A culture like ours, however, has long vilified these qualities and aspects of who we are, not just their improper expression or their abuse, but categorically, celebrating their complete absence as a virtue. Curiously, doing so actually predisposes the populace to tyranny, domination, and manipulation because agreeable people will go to great lengths to go along to get along, to appease those who threaten them, and they will be ill equipped to respond to the threat. Conflict avoidance is not some virtue at whose altar we must be prepared to sacrifice everything. That is what blackmailers say. "If everyone only did what I want, nobody would get hurt. Now look at what you made me do." By that logic, no one would ever get raped if they merely acquiesced, so it's the victim's fault. Sometimes we really do have to punch an asshole in the face and break his nose. Sometimes we do need to risk our own lives, or at the very least our comforts, for the sake of guarding or attaining a superior good. So, I would characterize falling levels of testosterone as a sign of general demoralization, especially among men, rather than a sign of some emerging utopia of a new hippie brotherhood. Academic performance of men in school is dropping. Sperm count is dropping. When we measure a culture, we must measure it against human nature, not the other way around or according to some false ideal we have come to fancy.