For some people, nothing should exist outside a state of complete regulation, every choice you could potentially make hemmed in by rules made and enforced by faceless others. It is somewhat strange that people are comforted by regulatory control: even when they obviously have no say in the results of that control, even when the consequences of that control are obviously terrible; even when such control is obviously more along the lines of suppression and destruction. That latter results when habitual and empowered controllers, unable to conceive of any other response to the new, are faced with something they do not understand.

Or perhaps this is all not so strange; many people would - and do - choose suffering over change, the familiar over the new, no matter how terrible the familiar might be at the moment. Human nature is, at heart, terribly flawed in many ways.

Community attitudes to the regulation of life extension:

Technologies purported to extend human life are already being marketed widely, and are being used by community members, despite a lack of evidence on their efficacy or safety: in fact, the use of some putative anti-aging technologies (e.g., human growth hormone) is illegal. Existing regulation is proving to be ineffective, especially in the face of Internet sales.

Further advances in the field of life extension are a distinct possibility, exacerbating the need for a policy response. This paper presents the preliminary results of a study of community attitudes to life extension, with a focus on attitudes to the control and availability of strong life-extending technologies.

Can't be having those advances, now, can we? I'm always deeply suspicious of people waving terms like "society" and "community." Invariably, those in fact mean something along the lines of "we who would like to think of ourselves as elites, but who prefer not to say so quite so openly."

It's rather sad that we live in an era of the downward spiral, right at the time at which there is so much progress in technology and human capabilities to be seized. Ever greater control and abrogation of personal responsibility leads to an irresponsible, demanding, passive-aggressive population, which leads to ever greater centralized control and destruction of freedom. We're overdue a revolution, a sea change in attitudes, or an unpleasant dip once more into comparative poverty of choice, vision and opportunity.