by Ernst Niekisch

Jul 26, 2024

Ernst Niekisch explores the development of Americanism and comfortism, highlighting how young America’s technical and economic ambitions fostered a society driven by material comfort and liberal values, distinct from the qualitative traditions of old Europe.

This is an excerpt from Ernst Niekisch’s Europäische Bilanz (European Assessment), 1951.

The bourgeois economism of young America, unencumbered by any feudal-class tradition, soon allied itself with the intellectual-aristocratic type of the technician; it adopted the types of priest and philosopher only as rudimentary appendages. The economic drive to accumulate globally merged with the technical urge to conquer nature; the result was an economic and political force of unprecedented victoriousness. There was nothing for which the price could not be paid, no difficulty that could not be surmounted by finding the necessary means and ways. In every respect, it was the land of unlimited possibilities, and what seemed impossible was made possible. Old Europe had a constant sense of boundaries and the peculiarities woven into its own limits, thus qualities. Young America knows no boundaries; qualities do not interest it — they are outdated junk, consolation for those who need to immerse themselves in the small and discover charms in the minor. Where there are no boundaries, one has an eye only for quantities; beyond the vast stretches lies even more, beyond the large lies the gigantic. The small and the narrow are contemptible; one proves one’s healthy strength by not being crushed by any enormity.

This young Americanism proved itself in mastering space on the one hand and in industrialization on the other. The businessman and the engineer work hand in hand; one finances and the other constructs, and wherever a new job prospect opens up, the technician immediately has a new constructive idea ready. Since there is no tendency toward stasis, no one becomes rooted; the farmer is as little attached to the land as the industrial producer. The financier, the pure plutocrat, takes the reins; he establishes industries where the location is favorable and relocates them at once when a better site beckons. The financial bourgeoisie that emerges ascends to unimaginable power. It does not flaunt its wealth; it does not provoke with it; it dresses simply; it involves the masses in the business through high wages. Beyond that, it creates a very special system of mass bribery, representing a kind of distribution of earthly goods and worldly bliss: this is comfortism.

Comfortism is the most palpable and probably the most honest form of realization of democratic liberalism. It cashes in the promissory notes that promised heaven on earth for all. Every citizen should have their own home with a vacuum cleaner, electric cooker, bathroom, and all the amenities of modern times; hygiene measures are pushed to the limit in all establishments, bakeries, slaughterhouses, and dairies; every task, including household work, is done by machines. Above all, however, everyone has their car, their cheap fuel; the smallest employee thus becomes the master of the American vastness. Comfort is everything; the amount of comfort one enjoys is the measure of the culture one possesses. The comfortability of external living creates paradise; inner personal values have been reduced to non-values, which no one asks about anymore.

One is a person if one bathes daily and changes clothes, observes all hygiene regulations, and drives in one’s car. All societal dishonesty is drowned in the sea of comfortism. The revolutionary is the one who has nothing to lose but his chains. Those who live in comfort are careful not to be radical; as long as one has conveniences, one prefers to make oneself comfortable.

Comfortism is an effective substitute for religion; it moderates attitudes by making people happy. It is a powerful reinsurance for the existing social condition; after all, it establishes a community of all beneficiaries of comfort against those who question it.

It is not by chance that the means of mass pacification and bribery, comfortism, flourished to full bloom in America; comfortism presupposed the abundance of natural wealth that the “God-blessed” land possesses, as well as the intensity of the technical-industrial development applied there. Technology contributes the enormous amount of labor that, beyond natural wealth, creates the additional artificially-industrially produced wealth necessary and that must be mobilized to carry out the comprehensive mass bribery on which the previous unshakability of American democracy relies. The genuinely liberal pride in how far one has come is nourished by comfortism: who, being carried upward by the automatic escalator, should not feel elevated above all peoples and humans who cannot offer such progress? One is considered a higher human being to the extent that one has comfort: that is roughly the cultural concept of Americanism.

(translated by Constantin von Hoffmeister)