>>18096389 (OP)
Serious answers only? It comes down to three things. The first being a lack of civic sense, the second being religion, the third being a self-fulfilling prophecy with people being stuck in a loop.
The first is that, obviously back in the day people just shit in holes or in fields, and up until recently there hasn’t been much plumbing and sewage infrastructure, so people were used to it. Until very recently there hasn’t been mass coordinated shaming campaigns against it. Secondly is religion. Many Hindus reject having plumbing installed in their homes if they were of a more conservative branch, because they believe it’s impure to have human shit in the home. Yes, this applies even to shit that sits in toilet water for a few seconds before being sucked down a tube out of the home. A Hindu environmental activist came up with a solution to this. The solution is to install two pits on the property. Each is meant to last 6 months. You install two pits outside the home, you only shit in one of them until it’s full, then switch to the other, and the first one ferments, and once shit is fermented into manure, it’s spiritually permissible to handle it, and therefore remove it. By the time the second pit is full, the first pit is manure and ready to be emptied. The problem is that a majority of Hindu homes that had this installed after rejecting plumbing were too lazy or bored to commit to using it, so a majority of homes abandoned it within a year and returned to public defecation.
The third issue, the self-fulfilling prophecy I mentioned is that because people shit in the rivers and the foot is often not prepared in a sanitary environment, the population suffers from mass indigestion, and people often have to shit spontaneously without making it to a bathroom and don’t want to shit their pants, so because of the pollution from fecal matter that comes from public defecation running off into the river and making people sick, they’re forced to.
