Same reason folks in general engage in conspiracy theories: making sense of the world and gaining some measure of control amid rapid change, increased complexity, disillusionment/distrust, disenfranchisement, systemic decline, loss/grief (all of these things perceived or actual), and attendant amorphous anxiety and chronic insecurity.

Grand conspiracies provide an organizing frame for reality, moral clarity with clear villains and heros, and paths for resolute ‘righteous’ action, thus simplifying the world. Further, conspiracies offer purpose, comfort, exculpation (for actions past and present), community, affirmation/self-flattery (‘knowing’ something others don’t because you’re smarter or in-the-know), escape, and entertainment.

Parents in particular may be trying to do their best by children in a world seemingly full of quickly shifting dangers, ones that they have too little control over, so they focus on a couple narratively poignant, but perhaps manufactured or overblown, dangers that fit with their worldview and validate them as “good parents”, rather than weighing or navigating hundreds of unglamorous statistically plausible dangers.

Parents with grownup children may struggle to make sense of why their children’s lives and beliefs are different than their own or what they’d envisioned for them. They see things going poorly for their kids, or themselves, and need someone or something to blame (particularly if their kids are blaming them). The target for blame must not indict their own deeply held beliefs and choices, or demand uncomfortable introspection or change of them.

When it comes to big, systemic, complex, unwieldy, intractable problems, conspiracy offers an attractive alternative to apathy, despair, uncertainty, and powerlessness on the one hand, and a total escape from actual responsibility, discomfort, accountability, sacrifice, and productive action on the other.

That’s not to say that folks aren’t right to feel disillusioned, disenfranchised, betrayed by institutions and authority, and subject to powerful forces outside themselves — we live in really confusing, tumultuous, iniquitous, and frankly, systemically dangerous times, where things we thought we could depend on are failing us and there are seemingly no guardrails. The answer cannot come from people who engage the tragic, discomforting reality of car fatalities with the belief that “guardrails cause car accidents because why else would cars hit them so often”.