Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit -- in a world that is limited. 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.

Final Ruin fiercely drives
Her plowshare o'er creation.

All human archives in this truth accord,
That feeble man is Ruin’s mighty lord;
States rise and fall as ages roll away,
But vice survives, the passions ne’er decay;
New tyrants start, where conquest once has been,
The drama constant, tho’ transposed the scene.

Ruin, eldest daughter of Zeus, she blinds us all, that fatal madness — she with those delicate feet of hers, never touching the earth, gliding over the heads of men to trap us all. She entangles one man, now another.

Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.

Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evil
but if some god shakes your house
ruin arrives
ruin does not leave
it comes tolling over the generations
it comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean floor
and all your thrashed coasts groan

On the wide and silent plain, darkening the bright daylight, she turns midday into darkness. People look upon each other in anger, they look for combat. Their shouting disturbs the plain, it weighs on the pasture and the waste land. Her howling is like Ickur's and makes the flesh of all the lands tremble. No one can oppose her murderous battle -- who rivals her? No one can look at her fierce fighting, the carnage, the engulfing water, raging, sweeping over the earth, she leaves nothing behind.

To rise by others' fall
I deem a losing gain;
All states with others' ruins built
To ruin run amain.

It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievements. Ruins pose a direct challenge to our concern with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They puncture the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth.

I've seen it before. There are women who spread ruin through no fault of theirs, just by being too beautiful, too ful of life and love. They can't help it. Poeple come to them as people go to a warm fire in winter.

Her wrath is a devastating flood which no one can withstand.
A great watercourse, she abases those whom she despises.
The mistress, a hurin bird who lets no one escape.
Inana, a falcon preying on the gods.