Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

Garrett Hardin coined this formulation in the late 1960s while arguing that shared, unregulated resources (a “commons”) are prone to overuse when individuals rationally pursue their own advantage. The line is associated with his influential essay “The Tragedy of the Commons,” published amid rising public concern about population growth, environmental degradation, and resource scarcity. Hardin used the commons as a model for problems like overgrazing, pollution, and fisheries collapse, contending that appeals to individual conscience are insufficient and that some form of “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon” is needed to prevent collective ruin.

The quote encapsulates Hardin’s central paradox: behavior that is sensible for each person in isolation can be disastrous when aggregated across a community sharing a finite resource. “Freedom in a commons” means unrestricted access without enforceable limits; under such conditions, each actor gains the full benefit of additional use while the costs are dispersed among all, incentivizing overconsumption. The “ruin” is not moral failure so much as a structural outcome of incentives. Hardin’s point is a warning about governance: preserving shared goods often requires collectively accepted constraints—rules, property regimes, quotas, or regulation—so that individual rationality aligns with long-term collective survival.