The most striking thing in chapter sixteen is that it lets the person it disapproves of speak. After naming the demonic endowment it gives, in the first person, the internal commentary of someone living under it, and the passage reads like a transcript.
This has been gained by me today; this desire I shall obtain; this wealth is mine, and this too shall be mine hereafter. That enemy has been killed by me, and I shall kill the others as well. I am the lord, I am the enjoyer, I am successful, powerful and happy. I am wealthy and well born; who else is equal to me? I shall sacrifice, I shall give, I shall rejoice.
The chapter's diagnosis is set out first. Such people, it says, do not know what to do and what not to do; purity, right conduct and truth are not found in them. They say the world is without truth, without foundation and without a governing principle, that it comes about by mutual union and has desire as its only cause. Holding that view, of small understanding and cruel in action, they arise as enemies for the destruction of the world.
Then comes the naming of the three gates of ruin, which is the chapter's best known verse: desire, anger and greed, destructive of the self, and therefore to be abandoned. The chapter closes by pointing to scripture as the authority for determining what should and should not be done, which is the Gita's most conventional moment and sits awkwardly beside its own repeated relativising of ritual elsewhere. Both positions are in the book, and the tension is not resolved.