I LIKE TO EAT SHIT!!!!

They joke about it online like it’s just shock humor, a dare, a “don’t kink-shame me” punchline. Someone says they like to eat shit, and the room splits instantly: half disgusted, half laughing, half pretending it’s normal because nobody wants to be the only person acting human anymore.

But here’s the darker take: what if it isn’t a joke, and it isn’t a kink.

What if it’s a stress-test.

Every influence system needs a calibration tool: a way to measure how far it can push a population before reality pushes back. Not with politics, not with religion, not with anything that has obvious stakes—because people resist those. You test compliance with something pointless, humiliating, and self-destructive, because the only reason anyone would agree is social pressure, algorithmic reinforcement, and the fear of being excluded.

So the theory goes: somewhere along the way, a behavioral program started seeding increasingly absurd “identity flags” into the culture—things that make no practical sense but create instant in-groups and out-groups. The point wasn’t the act itself. The point was the reaction. The point was to see whether the system could get people to publicly defend the indefensible, and to do it with confidence.

The real engine is the feed. It doesn’t care what the content is; it cares what the content does. Disgust is a high-voltage emotion. Disgust spikes attention, attention drives sharing, sharing trains the recommendation system, and the system learns that the fastest way to own your brain isn’t to persuade you—it’s to hijack your nervous system. Once you’re activated, you stop thinking in sentences and start thinking in signals: approve, reject, attack, defend, belong.

Now drop a taboo into that environment. Not a taboo with a clear moral debate, but a taboo so primal it bypasses language. The moment you see it, your body reacts before your mind forms an opinion. That’s the hook. And once you’ve hooked people, you can sort them into roles.

One group becomes the outraged enforcers. They keep the topic alive by screaming about it. Another group becomes the ironic defenders. They keep it alive by treating it like performance art. Another group becomes the “it’s not that big of a deal” crowd. They normalize it by flattening everything into relativism. You don’t need a majority to participate. You just need enough engagement to keep the algorithm feeding it oxygen.

Then comes the lever: public commitment.

If you can get someone to say, out loud, “Actually, this is fine,” about something their body knows is not fine, you’ve created a crack you can widen forever. Because after you defend one absurdity, the next one is easier. The brain hates admitting it was fooled, so it doubles down. It starts protecting the identity it just performed. What began as a joke becomes a badge. What began as a badge becomes a community. What began as a community becomes a channel you can steer.

That’s why, in this theory, the most important part isn’t the act. It’s the ritual around it: the attention, the outrage, the defenses, the purity tests, the reward of being “brave,” the punishment of being “judgmental,” the constant pressure to prove you’re not like the others. It’s a treadmill designed to convert shame into engagement.

And if you’re wondering who benefits, the answer is boring and terrifying: anyone who profits from a culture too distracted to focus. If people are arguing about the most degrading nonsense imaginable, they’re not organizing, building, learning, or resisting. They’re consuming, reacting, performing, and refreshing.

So the conspiracy isn’t “people secretly like disgusting things.”

The conspiracy is that the internet learned disgust is programmable, and someone decided to use it as a remote control—starting with the most extreme, humiliating signal possible, just to see how many people could be nudged into defending it… and how quickly everyone else could be trained to keep watching.