An un-human “logic” drives the “tragedy of the commons.” Garrett Hardin coined that term for the overexploitation of common resources by “rational beings each…seeking to maximize his gain,” which causes collective disaster by damaging what they depend on. But this is no unavoidable fate. Rather it’s a tragedy of poor thinking by supposedly elite reasoners, blind to simple solutions. Elinor Olstrom won a Nobel Prize in Economics for researching how groups overcome Hardin’s hard-of-thinking hurdle. But her work isn’t widely known. Before her Nobel, even prominent economists hadn’t heard of her. But we shouldn’t need Nobel laureate to see the obvious. Our survival has long required cooperation. We’ve evolved and developed ways to manage joint resources (e.g. punishing free riders) over about 10,000 generations. Hardin claimed “no technical solution” existed and that a “fundamental extension in morality” was needed. His framing of the moral as distinct from the rational/technical shows how scientists can misunderstand those words. Morals are simply social coordination rules. They can be rational. Aquinas distinguished natural from supernatural moral virtues. The natural virtues, or skills (taken from Aristotle) included justice, temperance, and prudence and were needed for humans to thrive on earth. Allowing foreseeably bad outcomes isn’t rational. Yet a supposedly rational economistic “logic” often encourages precisely that. Hardin spoke of a “tragedy of freedom in a commons,” which pinpoints the real issue. It’s not “the commons”, but an unsustainable idea of freedom. No community can allow freedom to create foreseeable collective doom. The fate of this logic is inescapable. Damage what you depend on and you risk perishing. Cultures with self-undermining forms of “rationality” and freedom don’t survive. That’s their common tragedy. - http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/07/26/greek-myths-about-human-origins/