एतां दृष्टिमवष्टभ्य नष्टात्मानोऽल्पबुद्धयः।प्रभवन्त्युग्रकर्माणः क्षयाय जगतोऽहिताः॥
etāṃ dṛṣṭim avaṣṭabhya naṣṭātmāno ’lpa-buddhayaḥprabhavanty ugra-karmāṇaḥ kṣayāya jagato ’hitāḥ
Word by word
The verse says
Holding that view, with themselves lost and their understanding small, they come up with cruel work and set about ruining the world.
In plain words
Now it turns from belief to damage.
Naṣṭātman - self lost. Not wicked. Lost. Something is missing rather than something having been added.
And the harm is not described as a private matter. These are called enemies of the world, which means the ruin reaches people who never met them.
Where you've felt this · in failure
Satish runs a small chemical unit outside town, and one year he starts letting the waste go into the drain at night. The filter costs money and money is tight. Nothing visible happens for eight months. Then a field three villages down stops producing, and nobody there will ever know why. He is not a monster. He made a cheap decision in a bad month and never had to look at it again.
Going deeper
Lost, not evil, is what the word in this verse actually means, and keeping that distinction alive changes how the whole passage reads.
Naṣṭātman is one whose self has gone missing. It describes an absence. Nobody is steering, so the actions come straight out of appetite and fear with nothing standing between them and the world.
The second half is the serious part. Private damage is one thing. This reaches outward, to people who had no part in it. That is the real objection to the view in the verse before - not that it is false, but that somebody always pays for it, and it is generally not the person holding it.
Which gives a test that has nothing to do with belief at all. Whatever a person thinks the universe is, the question is who carries the cost of how they are living. If the answer is mostly other people, something has gone wrong that no philosophy will mend.