What actually causes Flat Earth/Qanon/Lizard People/5G coronavirus/whatever? Is it a manifestation of mental illness and therefore some defect in brain chemist

What actually causes Flat Earth/Qanon/Lizard People/5G coronavirus/whatever? Is it a manifestation of mental illness and therefore some defect in brain chemistry or structure, in which case they need psychiatry more than fact checking? Is this not some kind of schizophrenia variant but maybe a pseudoreligion which fills the hole that in an earlier era might have been filled with fire and brimstone Baptist bible thumping or End Times theology, except Alex Jones got to them before the preacher did? Is it an information problem? Did their fourth grade science teacher just not do a very good job of explaining how Foucault's pendulum works and now they are into Flat Earth and all the rest but they can still be saved if we can just get them to read the Snopes article debunking it? How many are doing this just to be edgy (while possibly attracting some followers in the above three groups in a symbiotic relationship), because it's a pretty easy way to get media attention right now? Come up with some ridiculous stuff about the Flat Earth 5G Dead Internet Bird Hoax and The Guardian/NYT/WaPo/etc will write a bunch of hand-wringing articles fretting about the latest disinformation campaign which has been debunked six ways to Sunday by all right-thinking people. How else can you be transgressive and shocking in the 2020s?