Faith & Spirit Quote by Garrett Hardin

Hardin is doing something sharper than diagnosing religious anxiety; he is mapping a political psychology. “Panicked” is the tell: not “concerned” or “troubled,” but a body-level alarm. By stacking “disintegration,” “disappearance,” and “decay,” he paints modernity as entropy - a world where social bonds loosen, epistemic anchors slip, and moral codes stop feeling inevitable. It’s a triad designed to make the reader hear collapse, not change.

The second sentence tightens the vice. Hardin’s “Fear leads them to ask” reframes a theological claim as a stress response. Fundamentalism, in his telling, isn’t primarily an argument about truth; it’s a strategy for living under uncertainty. The question “if we cannot trust the Bible, what can we trust?” works rhetorically because it turns one institution into the last load-bearing wall. It’s not really about the Bible as text, but the Bible as guarantor: of family structure, of moral clarity, of a knowable hierarchy.

Context matters: Hardin is best known for “The Tragedy of the Commons,” a framework obsessed with limits, collective restraint, and the fragility of shared systems. Read through that lens, this quote is less a jab at believers than a warning about what happens when societies lose widely accepted legitimacy narratives. When certainty erodes, people don’t calmly update their priors; they reach for absolutes. Hardin’s subtext is that environmental and social crises won’t just strain resources - they will radicalize the need for certainty, and the politics built on it.