https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carroll_Quigley
It's relatively harmless and in good fun. Saying there is nothing there betrays ignorance on the source material. If anything I'm prone to believe some of the conspirators are behind the dissemination of the theories, if only to draw a little attention and recognition from a largely disinterested general public.
You work for money right? How does this scale?
If that would be possible there would be clear signs of it all over the world. It would require great effort not to notice it.
There is too much information nowadays. Life's truths used to be simple: USA good, Russia bad. You adopted the political views of your parents. Men worked and women stayed at home. Your favorite news station was always right. Too much information and fast change leads to a cognitive overload. One protection mechanism to not lose touch with reality and filter the large amounts of information, is to create very simple truths. One of these truths is that there are rich powerful people behind the curtain controlling everything.
Second, with the rise of the internet and search engines, it means that if you have an idea of a conspiracy, no matter how far out, there is likely a website already documenting it. Everyone can feel like an expert after a few hours of internet research. The barriers to publish your views on a conspiracy have vanished: always resulting in a few websites out there that confirm your hunches. For instance, if you perform research on vaccines, and start out as biased against them, you will likely stumble on a lot of a websites that tell you exactly what you want to hear: vaccines are bad and used by the governments to control their people.
Finally, there simply are a lot of rich and powerful people conspiring behind the scenes to move society in a certain direction. Just one example was the P2 lodge [1] in Italy, also called a "state within a state". It is unlikely that the queens of this giant collection of ant hills we call humanity have stopped conspiring. It just happens under a different name than the Illuminati. Symbolically, the Illuminati stood for rebellion against the church and royalty, in favor of monetary power and reason. That's a role for capitalists and scientists now.
While anarchy has to be the default assumption, its hardly the commonly accepted notion of the status quo. It seems much more comfortable to assume that everything is in order of a personally profitable higher purpose.
Whereas conspiracies are usually attributed to a lack of moral and socially intollerable consequences.
I mean, how are conspiracy theories comforting instead of scary? Instead, conspiracies and anarchy alike are scary because of a lack of cooperation.