Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [129]
Furthermore, we have made the lifestyle we currently have so appealing to the rest of the world that they want to join us at the feast. The Chinese government hopes to have a car in every family’s garage by 2050, and almost all other countries hope to catch up to the US in material standard of living. At least, unlike us, most of them are willing to sign the Kyoto Protocol. That’s too close to putting the “do” back into freem. E.O. Wilson has calculated 208 that for all currently living people to have the median US material standard of living, we would have to have four extra Earths’ worth of raw materials. This says nothing of the energy needed to pull off this feat but, as Wilson realizes, that point is moot. We have to choose between serious, permanent inequality at the level we now find it or else have less material wealth per person in this country (and in other parts of the West). Furthermore, even if we were to freeze world population and material well-being at current levels, we in the West would still run through the remaining raw materials at an unacceptably brisk pace.
Yet buying greener products such as more fuel efficient cars is just another way of having this unsustainable amount of stuff—we are still aiming at the lots-of-material-goods-per-person ideal, and this is not an ideal that can be met globally.
Idealistically, even assuming we could shake off the ideology of freem and consume less, there’s just no profit in it for the corporations that feed on freem. You cannot keep the stock market healthy if there’s no one buying stuff, and you can’t keep the assembly lines staffed and running when people have started to do with less, to recycle and to value things other than the latest toy.
Born Freem?
So how ingrained is freem? Osama bin Laden has often been reported as holding the view that Americans, since Vietnam, lack the stomach for a protracted war with a large body count. This supposed squeamishness of the US population is what Republican pundits like O’Reilly accuse the Democrats of courting and exploiting. We’re constantly told that we must buck up and not let the terrorists win simply because we refuse to let the body count climb as the calendar pages flip by. It seems to us that, for now, freemdom has become a strand of our national DNA. It is not a long, expensive and casualty-filled war that we can’t abide. Rather, we cannot stomach an economy in which we cannot fill up on the latest combo platter at TGI Friday’s.
As long as iPods continue to evolve, new cars come with subsidized gas and WalMart supplies us with ten-dollar shirts that we can buy with our cut and rebated taxes, we’re good. As long as the news is full of stories about there being no recession, the recovering stock market, the success of the surge and how technology is about to give us a new miracle fuel that will defeat the terrorists and let us get our SUVs back (basically, as long as we can live as we are told we want to live without doing anything), we’ll put up with anything else—even staying in Iraq for another hundred years. And as long as the stock market stays good, the overlords of freem are as happy as clams at high tide and we seem never to tire of being congratulated for helping in the fight. It seems that as long as the control of media remains in the hands of those who profit from citizens dutifully buying things, we are born into a mind-set of freem from which escape seems unlikely. Try to imagine how long you could go without the internet, television, newspapers, or electricity. Despite the fact that most people in the history of the world have lived and died happily without any of these things, it is a symptom of our immersion in the culture of freem that we can scarcely put ourselves in their shoes even for a short while.
Doing Nothing Is Still Doing Something
Absorbing and parodying these realities, The Colbert Report renders the consumer of the show active in his or her passivity.