A family of four travel seven miles into the wilderness – to a waterside campground in a national forest – to celebrate a holiday weekend. Mom, Dad, Grandpa, and the couple's three year old son enjoy a cozy time in this unfamiliar place until – suddenly, randomly, without a sound or a stir – the boy disappears out from behind Mom and Dad while on an evening walk up the creek. Mom and Dad were only distracted for five minutes at the very most. Over the following days and weeks, a wild hunt that draws hundreds of volunteer searchers on top of trained search and rescue officers ensues. Searchers find nothing. Scent dogs take no trail, not even around the oh-so-suspicious creek. Helicopter crews find nothing. Nobody ever finds a thing. The question may forever remain: What happened?

Maybe he was abducted by ninjas. Interdimensional Bigfeet? It's possible. There's a terrible man with a terrible mustache who'll take $30 from you for a book about how Interdimensional Bigfeet is the answer.

I want you to envision a meatball – no. If it were an adult, I'd ask you to imagine a meatball. Instead, imagine one of those pinhead-size sausage globs you see on supermarket pizzas. Fix the scale and composition of this tiny piece of flesh in your mind, then imagine I throw it into an overgrown residential backyard while you're not looking. Also, it's nighttime. Can you find the sausage glob, any of the sausage glob, before all the bugs and bacteria and varmints make it indistinguishable from the detritus under the overgrown grasses? What if I threw you a bone and said it's one of those really questionable globs of sausage from the real shady supermarket, and that it's got bone fragments and a single plastic seed bead in it also? What if I told you which general quadrant of the yard it was in? What if you were only three times the size of that sausage glob? Is it easier or harder now?

It's funny to think about a meatball hunt. It's less funny to think that the light of your world, your son, your joint project with the love of your life, is only 30 pounds of flesh in miles and miles of undeveloped wilderness. Wilderness where, in your unfortunate case, mountain lion encounters are on the rise even in suburban areas. Wilderness where you've never been before. Wilderness where, in the cool light of evening, walking and talking beside your love and glorying in your life together, fifteen minutes could turn to five in your mind.

It's less funny still to think that it might not even need to be fifteen, that five is time enough for him to dart off somewhere, distracted. Or for a mountain lion to take his neck from behind – because this is what they do with 30 pounds of flesh – and spirit him away. Not funny to think that, in terms of cognitive development, a child doesn't know what 'lost' even is until they're around four. Not funny to think that he might evade your calls, fearing punishment, that he might wander for hours and get hurt and hungry and cold to the point that he becomes the meal of scavengers.

The human eye and brain are not infallible. They scan and assume. They may overlook your son's red and white sneaker as a Coca Cola can, just another ripple in the wave of trash consuming the forest. They may not see the remains of his form in the tree bough cache of a predator, or in the root-choked hollow in a bend in the rushing creek. Scent dogs are not infallible and make mistakes just like humans do. They can't speak to us, either. They can't tell us, “I don't want to play our Find Game right now, I'm distracted by the scent of a rival predator. Our lives could be at stake right now. Why do you want to play?”

This is all awful to think about. It is all, let's say, intuitively repugnant. It wounds the ego to know that we're so small, shakes faith to know that the world is so callous and random and petty. It could kill the heart to reflect that we might have literally turned our back on the most important creature in our lives and let that random pettiness have him. Just from looking away. Just from not tracking time perfectly. Just by letting our guard down on a beautiful evening in the prime of our lives when everything was, for the very last time, perfect.

There's a flaw in intuitive human logic called proportionality bias, and it assumes this: “Whatever happens that's important (sub-clause: especially important to me personally) must have an equally important, usually intelligent cause.” If you're reading that and thinking it sounds a lot like how conspiracy theories work, you're correct. It's the heart of many if not most organically grown conspiracy theories and provides a lot of solace in the face of circumstances beyond our control or outside the realm of things we'd care to admit to ourselves.

It is, to a fragile human ego, very attractive to see encoded Russian pedophile subliminal messaging in the proliferation of weird, upsetting kids' YouTube videos generated by algorithms. More attractive, at least, than the greater probability that we are all complicit for survival's sake on a system that's reduced even our youngest children to ad-viewing machines to be slapped into clicking a link with threats to the safety of Peppa Pig the same way we're slapped by stealthy 'news' ads erroneously claiming that our favorite singer's daughter has died. It's not as fun – insofar as such a thing can be fun – to think that the same system that makes family size sacks of Qorn nuggets so affordable literally does not care about the most important people in your life, seeing them as a crop to be harvested.

Now, to whom might this kind of thinking most appeal? It's easy and typical to say 'idiots,' but this understates the depth of the issue. Many people you'd call idiots believe, for instance, that the Earth is a globe. They accept this because it was adequately explained to them as students and they don't feel any overriding need to compensate for their incomplete understanding of a complex idea by embracing a simple contrarian idea. They don't have as firm a grasp on the underlying principles as did the people who taught them, but this bothers them less than it might bother more insecure people.

Insecure people also tend to be incurious people, meaning they're less likely to actually look for answers to questions or solutions to problems. They want an answer expediently so they can have the answer and return to a place of complacency where they can tell themselves they're the smartest person in the room. They'll take a bad solution as long as they get a solution. To actually look for answers and confront their ignorance, to sit long-term in the space where they could be recognized as Not The Smartest, is profound suffering to them.

You might be tempted now to say, “Oh, so ego-tripping assholes,” and you'd be... less wrong than when you said they're all idiots, but maybe still not being fair?

See, for even the average stable and safe person, taking in information that wounds the ego (that being the part of you that's what you hope people believe about you) is pretty painful. It's even more painful for insecure people because their sense of self worth is already frail. They have a hard enough time maintaining feelings of worthiness without having to square their limited comprehension of events against the vastness of reality.

It's widely acknowledged that conspiracy thinking thrives in less educated communities, and while it's tempting to fall back on “They're all dumb,” as an explanation it's more likely that this is a Venn diagram kind of effect: Those with limited resources who have adequate education withheld from them, who then must interact with a society that devalues them for having come up in circumstances they didn't choose and couldn't control, are infinitely more likely to feel deep insecurity and compensate by adopting ideas that bolster their self worth. No matter how indefensible and absurd those ideas may be.

Consider: The people who embrace “The Earth must be a pizza because I can't conceive of how everything isn't exactly as flat as my yard because that's as far as I can see,” are struggling with the same niggling anxiety that the family who lost their toddler on a camping trip will have hurled at them from outside and in for the rest of their lives. That question is, “How on Earth could you be that stupid?” And they don't have enough compassion for themselves to realize that people make mistakes, even deadly and life-altering mistakes, and that many people struggle with complicated scientific ideas. In some sense, they're attracted to these ideas by their tendency to hold themselves to unrealistic standards. The meatball hunt analogy is silly but it's meant to illustrate the sheer scale of the situation our hypothetical family faces.

Ascribing events to the machinations of effectively omnipotent intelligences, malignant and otherwise, is a pretty common reaction when we can't accept either that something is beyond our immediate understanding or that something like a moment's inattention can ruin your life forever. "Bigfoot ate my baby," and the notion that the Lord God stamped a perfect AOL CD for us to inhabit until until the Rapture comes around appeal to the same insulating need for something tidy that allows us to bypass blame and just. Not think about these things. Bigfoot ate my baby. (Earth = pizza) = (me = smart). If God and teleporting Bigfoot are real, you don't have to worry your pretty little head about anything going on inside of you or reflect on any of your choices.

I'm not here purely to rag on these people