This is just the banality of evil though, isn't it? It's not that someone is sitting on a throne, cackling and stroking a cat evilly. It's just that a whole bunch of incentives pile up so that people go down the wrong path.
There's a famous phrase summing this dynamic up: "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."
(Apparently the original precise quote from Eric Hoffer was "Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.", which I think is even more on point.)
Colin Wright was expounding on the same theme on Twitter yesterday.
You must watch out for industries that begin for good reasons but have financial incentives to persist long past their expiration dates.
We are seeing this with many LGBT rights and antiracism orgs. They need homophobia, transphobia, and racism to exist, otherwise they wouldn't.
It's good to have organizations that stand up for human rights, but when financial incentives prevent an organization from acknowledging their own victories and success, we have a problem.
This doesn't just stall progress, but eventually actively reverses it.
There's a similar thing happening with COVID. COVID was & is a serious problem worth addressing, but COVID panic will outlast its expiration date because of the incentives for doing so.
I don't know the solution other than pointing out the phenomenon & staying vigilant about it.
Human rights organizations and institutions are structured in ways that assumes continuous growth, like any company. But this model is incompatible with human rights organizations because their mission is to destroy the justification for their continued existence.
And so the most successful and effective human rights organizations necessarily turn harmful when they're eventually forced to manufacture outrage for their continued existence.