Back in 2010, a mentally disturbed anti-human terrorist was shot to death by snipers after he took hostages at the Discovery Channel, demanding that the television service stop “encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants,” and instead air “programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility.”

Now, a similar disturbing scenario befell Palm Springs, Calif., where a young man named Guy Edward Bartkus killed himself, injured four people, and caused widespread property destruction when he detonated a huge car bomb in front of an in vitro fertilization clinic. The motive? According to Newsweek’s reporting, Bartkus was a “‘pro-mortalist’ (believing death is preferable to living) or an ‘anti-natalist’ (believing no more human beings should be born).”

Anti-natalism is a form of anti-humanism, which isn’t just believed by mentally disturbed people capable of violence. Indeed, various forms of anti-humanism have been promoted in professional journals, the media, and popular culture, as a consequence of which, nihilism has been slowly seeping through the culture like a stain.

What are the primary pretexts for such species self-loathing? A neurotic fear of suffering, misguided forms of feminism, and radical environmentalism. Consider the following non-comprehensive examples:

• Last year, the Cambridge Quarterly of HealthCare Ethics published an article by a philosopher urging that people stop having children because “all lives are occasionally miserable, some lives are predominantly miserable, and individuals may think, justifiably, that their lives have no meaning. My reason suggests that it would be unwise and unkind to bring new people into existence and thereby expose them to these risks.”
• Last year, the Journal of Medical Ethics ran a piece explicitly comparing pregnancy to the measles, in which the authors asserted: “Pathologizing pregnancy could, in fact, lead to better treatment for women. If pregnancy is construed as a disease and access to contraception and abortion as preventive medicine.”
• Last October, the New England Journal of Medicine published a demand that public policy cease promoting childbearing. The author decried “pro-natalism” as threatening “the health and well-being of women and marginalized people.”
• An Oxford University professor yearned for human extinction because that would prevent the unquantifiable suffering of future generations, writing, “The best outcome would be the immediate extinction that follows from allowing an asteroid to hit our planet.”
• A few years back, the New York Times ran a puff piece on Les Knight, the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction movement, where we learn that despite his desire to see all humans die out, that he is “a remarkably happy-go-lucky human.” Isn’t that special?
• Prominent environmentalists embrace explicit anti-humanism on a regular basis. Thus, David Suzuki has called us “maggots” who spend our lives “defecating all over the environment.” Sir David Attenborough has supported radical human depopulation because he reviles us as a “plague on the earth.” Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, has called us the “AIDS of the earth,” stating that “curing the biosphere of the human virus will . . . require a radical and invasive approach.”
• Popular culture also gets into the anti-human act. For example, the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still stars Keanu Reeves as a space alien named Klaatu, sent here to commit total genocide to save the galaxy from our infestation. In the end (spoiler alert), he charitably renders us totally non-technological, which, the movie fails to note, would cause the deaths of billions of people. There is even a Noah’s ark kind of scene in which animals are temporarily removed from the planet in spaceships to be returned upon our annihilation.
• Speaking of arks, the god-awful 2014 film Noah, starring Russell Crowe, depicts God as causing the Flood not because of man’s sinfulness, but to — yes — save the earth from man’s despoliation. Noah’s family is not commanded to “be fruitful and multiply,” but rather, to die off after the animals are saved so that Earth can again become a paradise.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea.

The growing anti-humanism infecting the culture fuels nihilism. Worse, human-phobia can be dangerous because — as we see in the two examples provided at the top of this piece — there are mentally unbalanced people who don’t see misanthropy as an intellectual mind game but are willing to act out violently in support of the anti-human cause.

Or to put it another way, how we perceive ourselves determines ultimately how we act. Anti-humanism is the disease. Human exceptionalism is the cure.