Microplastics in Our Souls

The Last Men:
Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity
by charles cornish-dale
regnery, 288 pages, $32.99

Charles Cornish-Dale, who posts on X under the nom de plume Raw Egg Nationalist, is a British graduate from the University of Exeter with a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oxford. Under his pseudonym, he published The Eggs Benedict Option—a conscious allusion to Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option—and The Raw Egg Trilogy. He was doxed in 2024 and has dedicated his post-doxing era to writing a thoroughly researched synopsis of his online efforts to sound the alarm on the omnipresent health risks of contemporary life and the catastrophic decline of masculinity they have caused, though his materialist framework leaves more fundamental questions unanswered.

The Last Men catalogues a modern-day scientific Ten Plagues of Egypt that, according to Cornish-Dale, will end with either permanent slavery or the remaking of the ossified liberal-democratic order. Widespread use of agricultural chemicals and plastics, and the ubiquity of processed food and environmental pollution, has created an inescapable array of endocrine-disrupting estrogenic chemicals and pollutants that have caused testosterone levels in men to plummet by 20 percent in a twenty-year period. If the trend continues, male fertility could become a thing of the past.

But the effects of this decline aren’t limited to sexual impotence. The focus of The Last Men isthe social and political impact of this hormonal shift. Increased estrogen levels have been shown to make monkeys less social and, contrary to the caricature of the hormone, more aggressive. Meanwhile, increased testosterone levels are counterintuitively linked with decreased aversion to advantageous inequality. In other words, higher levels of testosterone result in more comfort with hierarchical social relations—both for those at the top and bottom of those hierarchies—and less concern with equality.

Drawing on Fukuyama, Nietzsche, Freud, and Plato, Cornish-Dale identifies the suppression of thymos, or the desire for recognition, as a core feature of contemporary liberal democracy. That desire comes in two forms: one egalitarian, the other hierarchical. Isothymia is the desire to be recognized as an equal. Megalothymia is the desire for distinction. Liberal democracies encourage the former but suppress the latter.

So far, so familiar. Where The Last Men breaks with its classical and modern sources is in its unabashed materialism. It equates the desire for recognition with hormone levels in the blood “[b]ecause thymos is, for all intents and purposes, testosterone.” While there is merit in this approach, especially from the point of view of health, the moral and theological significance of thymos is elided.

In Plato’s hierarchy of regimes, thymos-inspired love of honor is essential to the reign of both the philosopher kings (his preferred regime) and the warrior aristocracy (the second-best regime). For the philosophical soul, the love of honor is a handmaid to the love of truth, conferring courage not just to know the truth, but to govern by it in the face of opposition. For the warrior, love of honor is a spur to outdo others in feats of arms and bravery, securing power in the state and ipso factorendering it well protected.

But plutocrats and democrats have little interest in courage, as money-making and the life of the stomach simply don’t require it. Likewise, their regimes are not renowned for their commitment to truth or glory. It’s a missed opportunity of The Last Men that it sidesteps the question of testosterone’s significance, if any, for the cultivation of the closely connected virtues of truthfulness and courage, and their importance for political leadership. More fundamentally, there is little indication that the “last men”have both body and soul. Cornish-Dale simply ignores the Christian insight that sainthood is possible even with a decrepit body in a deeply degraded environment.

Instead, the book’s focus is squarely on the many sources of the decline in testosterone and the three principal effects of that decline. First, lower testosterone levels and lower fertility in men are caused by everything from tight pants and too much sitting to phthalates and microplastics in our blood, lungs, eyeballs, and testicles. The environmental pollutants are pervasive, and even the most hermetic lifestyle cannot escape exposure since rainfall carries the pollutants far from their source to the most remote regions of Earth.

Second, Alex Jones is vindicated for his prophecy that atrazine and other chemicals are “turn[ing] the friggin’ frogs gay!” Cornish-Dale reviews evidence that not only homosexuality but the rise of transgenderism is similarly attributable to chemicals that pervade our environment thanks to industrial-scale food production that wreaks havoc on natural hormone production.

Third, globalists have not been shy about their plans to move the world’s population to the “Planetary Health Diet,” a plant-based diet that allows for negligible consumption of animal products. This scheme is the occasion for The Last Men to expound the harmful effects of seed oils and processed food while extolling the many benefits of diets high in meat, milk, and eggs. The real target of the globalists and their corporate counterparts, however, is not the food per se, but thymos itself. A less spirited population will be easier to govern and will submit more readily to ever-increasing restrictions on their freedom.

Cornish-Dale is candid that the most an individual can do is decrease, not eliminate, exposure to environmental pollutants. The long-term solutions are ultimately social and political. The Last Men advocates the fundamental right to animal-based food and an end to corporate capture of regulatory agencies. If the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture had done their jobs, both our soil and our bodies would not have become contaminated in the first place.

In the face of these contemporary plagues, Cornish-Dale hopes that his remedies can lead his readers out of captivity to the decaying liberal-democratic regime that would prefer to keep them servile, feminized, weak, and unambitious. His prescriptions may well free men from the tyranny of globalists and agribusiness, but The Last Men is silent on how to free men from a far more sinister form of servitude: slavery to themselves and their insatiable desire for worldly recognition.