Given that hormones control most of the processes occurring in our bodies, there wouldn’t be a society as there wouldn’t be any individuals
Hormones are powerful drugs. Taken by everybody. Creating massive aggresstion, obsession and mental disturbance. What would freedom from its influences look like for a society? An individual?
Submitted 10 months ago by cameron_vale@lemm.ee to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
Comments
DrMoronicAcid@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Sheeple@lemmy.world 10 months ago
[deleted]aebrer@kbin.social 10 months ago
All of these have very real physical effects, and human life cannot exist without them.
PrinceWith999Enemies@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I’m assuming you don’t mean people abusing steroids, but hormones, period (no pun intended), because you say they’re used by everybody.
So, okay. I’m a biologist and I’m not sure how to answer this question except to say that we wouldn’t exist. By “we” I pretty much mean life on earth as we know it.
Let’s start with Wikipedia:
A hormone (from the Greek participle ὁρμῶν, “setting in motion”) is a class of signaling molecules in multicellular organisms that are sent to distant organs by complex biological processes to regulate physiology and behavior.[1] Hormones are required for the correct development of animals, plants and fungi.
A hormone is not a drug.
A drug is any chemical substance that when consumed causes a change in an organism’s physiology, including its psychology, if applicable.[1][2][vague] Drugs are typically distinguished from food and other substances that provide nutritional support
You can take hormones as drugs, but drugs are things that are consumed. Hormones produced within your body are part of and necessary to maintaining your life from before you are a you until the day you die. They regulate your metabolism. They’re directly responsible for keeping your body alive and in sync with the environment. They’re everywhere - animals, plants, and fungi.
So, no, please don’t get rid of hormones. We’re using them.
Now, diseases and disorders caused by hormonal dysfunction are a different story. Those, hopefully, can be treated medically or with therapy. That’s a different question, though.
Poggervania@kbin.social 10 months ago
Me, a misanthrope: “so you’re saying we should definitely get rid of hormones”
cameron_vale@lemm.ee 10 months ago
I meant sex hormones. Creating this powerful mental influence, coloring how we see and think. Urges to fight and fuck. Aggression. Obsession. All that.
I guess I wasn’t as clear as I thought.
(In my title, I’m trying to be clear yet succinct. Stick to terms everybody can understand. Deliver it all inside 50 characters or whatever the limit is because everybody skips the text. So I’m honing that craft)
zeppo@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Hormones is too broad a word to use without being more specific. ‘Taken by everybody’ is a bit broad and inaccurate. Personally I have to inject a very powerful hormone several times a day to avoid dying, which most people produce naturally in sufficient quantities (insulin). I assume you’re talking about exogenous testosterone and I agree, people without a medical need for this should not have access to it.
cameron_vale@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Ok. I thought it was obvious. Edited.
oshitwaddup@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz 10 months ago
Probably just go extinct very quick
cameron_vale@lemm.ee 10 months ago
No no. Cheap answer. We’d find a way to breed without hormones pushing us around. Look at science, engineering, flower gardening. Plenty of ambition there.
PP_BOY_@lemmy.world 10 months ago
You seem to have a very poor grasp on science, engineering, and horticulture.
ShunkW@lemmy.world 10 months ago
You… You know that hormones naturally occur in the body right? You know that without hormones, no one would grow ever? Hormones regulate eating, sleep, and more. You know this, right?
HeartyBeast@kbin.social 10 months ago
Here's a handy list of hormones produced by the body: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_hormones
Look at the list of affects in the right hand column. I doubt most of us would form into viable embryos beyond a few weeks, let alone form a society.
cameron_vale@lemm.ee 10 months ago
There’s a whole block of text there in my op that I think you skipped
ristoril_zip@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
The problem honestly is your concept of hormones is incomplete. There are no hormones that only do one thing. They might have a primary function. But they all have secondary and tertiary functions. They all regulate other hormones. Evolution doesn’t do single functions.
If you knock down a “fight” hormone you’re probably going to mess up the homeostasis of the body in other ways. You can probably “fix” that artificially, but you’ll be constantly chasing the next side effect. Humans are chemical Rube Goldberg machines of infinite order. Disrupt one thing and it all goes out of whack.
cameron_vale@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Then go with “freedom fom the mind-altering influences”. What would that look like?
Alto@kbin.social 10 months ago
That doesn't exist, considering things as basic as hungry is a mind-altering influence
Sheeple@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Time to report any transphobic comments made here and block them 🤣
Seriously it’s like some of the people coming here can’t help it
agent_flounder@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I think your question is based on an incorrect assumption that testosterone directly and solely causes aggression and other effects. I did a very cursory search for some research papers on the topic that immediately suggest things are nowhere near that simple.
Based on that, if you further tamped down any effects hormones have on human behavior and psychology, I think what would happen is that the many other environmental and genetic factors that cause anti social aggression, obsession, libido, etc., would continue to cause nearly as many problems as they already do.
If you want a better world then I personally think we need to work on eliminating childhood neglect and abuse and improving the emotional / mental health of parents (and, really, everyone).
cameron_vale@lemm.ee 10 months ago
One example of the power of sex hormones : our obsession with titties (and related sexy stuff). A huge amount of popular music and advertising treats that obsession as its foundational strength. A glance of nipple is like lightning. A bared breast becomes the talk of the town. Porn is massive. Why? Because our sex hormones told us to think that way. Whole multibilliondollar industries depend on it. My mind reprogrammed. My aesthetics turned.
I don’t know about you, but I find the idea that my mind has been manipulated like that to be concerning.
And then when it’s an entire population being affected like that. It’s huge. Like beyond the internet scale huge.
Nougat@kbin.social 10 months ago
What about the individual??
Flat effect no ambition misery? Or creative powerhouse and visionary?
Personal experience: I spent my entire youth and a large portion of my adulthood being amazingly preoccupied with sex, and with a fair amount of aggression towards everyone and everything.
Between testiulcar cancer, many consistent years of antidepressants, and just being old, I am finally feeling relief from those. I don't claim to be a "creative powerhouse and visionary" by any stretch, but I am far from having a flat affect, I'm no more or less ambitious than I was before, and I am decidedly less miserable.
In hindsight, I can see that libido and aggression have always been an obstacle to my reaching my potential. Having built some bad habits over decades, they still are. None of us get to accomplish everything we want, so I'm trying not to fret about it too much.
Overall, as an individual whose life experience has changed from one extreme to the other - whether hormones have anything to do with it or not - I much prefer the current stage in my life to the former.
cameron_vale@lemm.ee 10 months ago
I think that St Augustine cut off his balls. Puberty was coming on. He didn’t like what it was doing to his clarity of mind. So he grabbed the scissors.
He was an impressive guy.
Born 1700 years ago. He adapted Classical thought to Christian teaching and created a powerful theological system of lasting influence. He also shaped the practice of biblical exegesis and helped lay the foundation for much of medieval and modern Christian thought.
So there’s one argument for. If he was born today he might have written a nice video game.
cameron_vale@lemm.ee 10 months ago
The influence of these hormones, it could be likened to being drunk all the time. But everybody’s drunk, so it’s normal.
Maybe later generations will invent a switch or a therapy.
AnonTwo@kbin.social 10 months ago
...Nobody would exist, those hormones are what allowed humanity to survive and reproduce long enough to ask this question.
As crude as those things are when you look at the worst parts of humanity, they're necessary.
cameron_vale@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Well now that we’ve survived long enough. What if he did it today? What if we removed the aggression and the fixation on titties and the rest. Just extracted the whole mental influence there.
AnonTwo@kbin.social 10 months ago
We'd die out. It's clearly a question that's hyperfocused on the worst aspects of it.
Sheeple@lemmy.world 10 months ago
[deleted]justlookingfordragon@lemmy.world 10 months ago
That applies to Testosterone / Estrogen, yes. But keep in mind that there are a lot of non-sexual hormones as well. Insulin and Adrenaline for example are also hormones, and if a body stops producing enough insulin, you can’t exactly claim that “not a lot changes”.
Sheeple@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Well Insulin for an example doesn’t change behavior which is what OP primarily asked about. But it certainly would cause issues if it was gone.
Adrenaline’s function is primarily pain numbing and increasing resource flow to your muscles.
Honestly 99% of hormones don’t affect behavior but rather so our physical biological activity. When I say “Not a lot” I mean mentally. Physically you’d fucking die tho lmao
cameron_vale@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Yes yes, I’m referring to the big famous mind-altering hormones specifically.
cameron_vale@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Pre-puberty I was less aggressive and did not look twice at girls.
That’s 99% of politics and advertising down the crapper right there.
I’d call that a pretty big difference.
uphillbothways@kbin.social 10 months ago
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3029708/
Also, baby smells get you high and promote warlike behavior and ethnocentrism. Don't forget those.
cameron_vale@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Woah, I didn’t know that. Ya I definitely don’t want that stuff running around in my head.
Have you heard the one about St Augustine?
sincle354@kbin.social 10 months ago
Intro thoughts, feel free to skip to next paragraph: What you're basically suggesting (based off edit) is the massive and unrelenting attack on our more base urges. My boyfriend says this is "peripheral route persuasion", and it includes sex appeal and also things like happy people drinking Coke. Indeed advertising almost exclusively uses these tactics to get you to buy something (or at least remember) within 30 seconds or less.
But I think you're getting at the main core of human interaction, where the natural order of people is to act based off of emotion and not really think about it. Alternately, you can put your mind into big-brain thinking mode and make a salient choice to not drink brown spiced lemon fizzy sugar water.
The Elaboration Likelihood Model essentially assumes that "As motivation and/or ability to process arguments is decreased, peripheral cues become relatively more important determinants of persuasion. Conversely, as argument scrutiny is increased, peripheral cues become relatively less important determinants of persuasion." These peripheral cues can be hormone based, for example. Therefore, it suggests a central route of information processing (think hard about it), and a peripheral route of information processing (gut feeling).
This is any information, not just persuasion. You see hot girl on street, you consider your car looks cool, you try to pick her up by using her car as evidence to hop in.
Btw, in the Wikipedia article they literally spell out the consequences of this theory in Politics, Advertising and Media (all of it).
cameron_vale@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Imagine a society made up of eight-year-olds. Gentle, un-aggressive. Couldn’t care less about titties. Incredible clarity of mind.
There would still be art and science. Soccer and carpentry would still be fun.
We just wouldn’t have that little pseudococaine gland squirting into our bloodstream 24-7.
eyes@lemmy.world 10 months ago
You body begins to die a painful but probably mercifully quick death. Hormones are vital to your bodies continual survival and even if you targeted specific ones, you’d just be creating problems for yourself. Elimated dopamine? Congrats you’ve given yourself ADHD and a host of other personality problems. Melotnon? Oops no more sleep for you, enjoy your sudden weight gain and compromised immune system. We don’t take hormones, we are hormones.
zeppo@lemmy.world 10 months ago
No insulin? Dead in 2-7 days.
cameron_vale@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Not what I meant. Edited for clarity.
agent_flounder@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I thought dopamine was a neurotransmitter not a hormone.