Cracked, Old People, and Slavery

This article was truly terrifying, but one thing stood out:

"Now that more people are living to be 70, 80, 90 and 100, research shows quite clearly that sex is as important as ever."

Thankfully, now that we can undo nature with medicine, it's meaningful to speak of sex in old age - we can't have old people behaving maturely, after all. Besides the whole "let's take pills to fight futilely against nature" perversion of Viagra, the need to actually purposely create a desire stronger than reason is an awful result of hedonism. Let's go to Plato, hitting it out of the park:

For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many.

Sophocles must have underestimated the calm, if not freedom, of being ruled by a strong enough master to prevent our having to rely on the exercise of reason, which, after all, is difficult, painful, and rare.

The appeal of slavery also explains a lot about election politics - self-government is hard, being a subject is easy.