The Infrastructure Harm Mechanism: Downstream Harm: A Non‑Moral Theory of Harm Production in Complex Systems

The Infrastructure Harm Mechanism formalizes a non‑moral theory of harm production in modern systems. It demonstrates that harmful outcomes do not require malicious actors but emerge predictably from misaligned upstream incentives. The work introduces and defines the Incentive Reinforcement Loop, the Minimum‑Viable Output Attractor, the Coercive System Stack, and the principle of Friction Against Correction, showing how these mechanisms stabilize degradation across institutional domains. The essay also situates contemporary structural analysis within a longer historical arc by reframing early moral sayings—such as “the devil gets to you through your pocket” and “you cannot serve both God and Mammon”—as pre‑structural attempts to describe incentive‑driven behavior. The result is a unified, mechanistic account of how institutions generate, normalize, and reproduce harm without requiring intention or malice.