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Human Work

Chapter 6: III: CONCEPT AND CONDUCT Summary
By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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Sociology

About This Book

A systematic examination of social and economic life that treats familiar facts as outcomes of underlying processes, arguing that widespread suffering, ignorance, and inefficient institutions persist despite material advances. The work analyzes social evolution, concepts and conduct, and exposes false assumptions while mapping the social soul and body. It traces economic processes — labor, specialization, production, distribution, and consumption — and contends that many hardships are socially produced and therefore preventable. The author advocates a scientific social physiology to diagnose social pathologies and recommends reorganization and enlightened policy as remedies.

III: CONCEPT AND CONDUCT
Summary

Human evolution. New faculties and instincts. Egoistic concept useful to individual animal. Disadvantage of outgrown ideals. Persistence of social rudiments explained. Need of social scrap-heap. Social relations psychic. Despot only a concept. Concepts internal environment. Shipwreck and character. Maternal and sex instinct and concepts. Negro hero, power of concept on conduct. Man’s efforts to check his growth. Prejudice a physical brain condition. Healthy brain must be used. Virtue of “believing.” Natural organic tendency to consistency,—how perverted. Belief in luck. Charades. Basic concepts wrong. Superior past traditions. Ancestor worship. Fanaticism. Forced inconsistency. Concepts antedate facts. French Revolution. Slavery. Undertow of old brain habits. Increase of social convenience. Brain as developed by natural selection, by social selection. Apparent injustice. Individual hunter. On his own head. Mistakes most possible in highest grades. Peasant grade always preserved. Rub out and do over. Society the best culture for fools. Present concepts in economics, primitive, false, injurious. Ego concept. If bees were “idiots.”