Informant38

The law is revered for itself now, but rationalized by what it protects when it gets discussed philosophically, so that what that is it protects can be pointed to when the law is clearly wrong or incomplete or inadequate. The flaws are excusable because of the larger goal.
This is enacted individually in those who act as protectors and enforcers of the law, they have shrines in their hearts, dedicated to what they hold above themselves.
Excessive enforcement of specific codes and the often violent systemic championing of the concept itself, as well as the kind of propaganda brainwash techniques of child-raising that enforce that reverence blindly, result in what we have now - the inverse of respect for what the law was designed and intended to protect, respect instead for the law itself, the punishment side of the legal protocol first, and what is rewarded by its protection, whatever that is, however far it is from the original design, second - and the near-universal idea that anything that isn't specifically against the law right now is permitted right now.
This is how evil gained the upper hand in human affairs.
Going back to that original impulse, the desire to create some kind of protective barrier around what should be protected, a mammalian drive that's as deep as bones, what should be protected as seen through the lens of human consciousness, means that now anything that has been protected by the law, anything whose being owes its fullness to the protection of the law, can point to itself as the reason for the law existing in the first place. And there will always be something there, protected by the law, as long as there are laws and people who enforce them. Even if it's the antithesis, even if it's what the law was originally designed to protect against - as we have now - the evil the law was brought to bear against hides behind it in safety.
It parallels common attitudes toward wealth. Those who have it generally feel that they deserve to have it, and those who don't have it also feel they deserve to have it.
Which means the systems by which wealth is gotten and maintained are necessary to them wherever they are in that chain, even as those systems change over time.
This sense of the rightness of things, felt as central by almost all who benefit from anything, whether law or economy or the aftermath of disaster, is the main obstacle to real progress here. It's the pavlovian bell-and-treat that keeps the momentum of things implacable, and prevents enlightened change.
This is how evil maintains the upper hand in human affairs.