No Stupid Questions

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. Melotonin? Oops no more sleep for you, enjoy your sudden weight gain and compromised immune system. We don't take hormones, we are hormones.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Probably just go extinct very quick

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).

...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.

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.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-smell-of-newborn-babies-triggers-the-same-reward-centers-as-drugs-58482/

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.

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 your*(edit) 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).