Wit & Attitude Quote by Garrett Hardin

Hardin comes in with a heckler’s flourish: the “tongs of reason” are a fussy, polite tool, and “chestnuts out of the fire” implies someone else has started the blaze and now wants you to do the dirty work. It’s a compact jab at a familiar liberal reflex - the belief that if you just spot the inconsistency, the argument collapses. Hardin’s point is that with religious fundamentalism, contradiction is a feature, not a bug. The believer doesn’t need coherence the way a secular debater does; patching holes with logic only rescues the claim from embarrassment and grants it the dignity of being treatable as a normal proposition.

The line also telegraphs a strategic refusal. Hardin isn’t merely diagnosing fundamentalists as irrational; he’s warning that “rational critique” can be a kind of unpaid PR. When you try to steelman a worldview built to be insulated from falsification, you end up laundering it into the arena of reasonable disagreement, where it can endlessly “respond” without ever being vulnerable to defeat.

Context matters: Hardin, best known for The Tragedy of the Commons, spent his career arguing that resource constraints don’t yield to moral sentiment or rhetorical comfort. He often clashed with faith-based or absolutist politics around population and environment. So “their real troubles lie elsewhere” is less a shrug than a redirection: the engine of fundamentalism isn’t bad logic but deeper social functions - identity, authority, community, existential security. If you want to understand its power (or its threat), you don’t litigate syllogisms. You interrogate what the belief is doing for the believer, and what it’s doing to everyone else.