The Gentrification of the Mind

In most other areas of life, complexity is where truth lies.

This new crew, the professionalized children of the suburbs, were different. They came not to join or to blend in or to learn and evolve, but to homogenize.

Eviction of the weak has always been a force in the development of New York City. First Native Americans were removed. In 1811, Manhattan was laid out in a series of grids in order to make real estate sales and development easier to control. Then farmers were displaced. Then African Americans who lived in what is now Central Park. Then working-class and poor neighborhoods were eliminated to build the Brooklyn Bridge. The Depression produced mass evictions. And Robert Moses's highway systems replaced more working-class communities

This undermines urbanity and recreates cities as centers of obedience instead of instigators of positive change.

Spiritually, gentrification is the removal of the dynamic mix that defines urbanity—the familiar interaction of different kinds of people creating ideas together.

Gentrification is a process that hides the apparatus of domination from the dominant themselves.

There was a gentrification of the mind, an internal replacement that alienated people from the concrete process of social and artistic change.

How did it happen that there were two such different trajectories of consequence? That there was the suffering and trauma for some, and the vague unknowingness for others? What was the mechanism that obscured the reality and replaced it with something false, palatable, and benign? Something diminishing and destructive and yet that appeared so neutral?

I loved that he wanted to know, and hated that he didn't get it, didn't understand what was missing, how much is gone.

Everyone had suffered profoundly from that magic combination of the mass death of their friends and the mass indifference of government, families, and society.