You’d think being a science-fiction and fantasy writer would make it easier to believe things that seem impossible on the face of them, but it actually makes it harder.

Oh, since I’ve already written about things I believe to be true that my atheist, skeptic, and Doubting Thomas friends think impossible, I’ll understand if you don’t take this on faith. But from inside myself, I can tell you it’s a major struggle every time I have to come to terms with something that outrages my common sense, my connection to everyday reality, and my reason.

One of the things I tend to be most skeptical about is a conspiracy theory. It’s not that they don’t exist. They do. “Conspiracy” is an actual criminal charge that can be filed against people who can be linked to a crime. In fact, there’s not only a criminal indictment for being a conspirator before the fact, there’s also one for being a conspirator after the fact — that is, being a part of a cover-up.

Conspiracy in the political sense is also quite common. Every coup d’état in history began as a conspiracy. Most aboveboard political organizations, political parties, political action committees, lobbying groups, and special-interest groups have private strategy sessions not open to the public, with discussions not recorded by a secretary, and with reporters not invited. Think tanks often meet in private for free-wheeling discussions that would be embarrassing if some of the more bizarre discussions were made public. Policy organizations have their private sessions, and elected officials often meet off the record with both official and unofficial advisers and consultants.

Private business executives often discuss business off the record, out of earshot of shareholders or regulators. Sometimes rich and powerful people just like to get together with other rich and powerful people to try to move the world in a direction they think it should go. Poor and powerless people also do this, but unless they have unusual perseverance it usually doesn’t get as far.

Finally, there are the actual classified military operations and clandestine intelligence services whose work by definition is secretive.

None of this is what is usually meant when we talk about Conspiracy Theories — the idea that there is some long-standing Secret Society that is the Shadow Government, or Power Behind the Throne, or the Ruling Class, Power Elite, New World Order, or Illuminati. Some of these conspiracy theories are simply the belief that powerful entities from the past are still running things, whether it’s the belief that the Queen of England is a drug lord, or the Pope is behind the Jews, or that Communists had to go to Kenya in 1961 to find a black baby they could raise to be elected President of the United States as their super-secret-agent 47-years-later.

Then there are the Conspiracy Theories that require even more imagination: UFO’s landed a long time ago (or were our progenitors) and They are among us, behind the scenes, manipulating everything that goes on.

And it would be unfair of me not to bring up the common belief of many Jews, Christians, and Muslims, that entering our world from other realms Angels and Demons fight secret battles that influence our lives.

I believe there are conspiracies in the mundane sense all the time. Conspirators compete against other conspirators, and while some win, others lose.

Most successful conspiracies require military discipline — only those who “need to know” are told anything, and only precisely what they need to know and no more. More than that and you get leaks. And the longer the plan takes, the more likely it will implode on itself due to accidents, incompetence, changes of heart. Murphy’s Law: “If anything can go wrong it will go wrong.” Robert Burns: “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men, gang aft agley.”

Or, more simply: shit happens.

But sometimes things happen in overall patterns that look just like conspiracies but happen so openly that you have to wonder if it’s not just contagious ways of thinking. Richard Dawkins, in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, postulated that ideas he called “memes” could be spread by human cultures in the same way “genes” could spread throughout species.

I think I’ve identified such an idea, and I think it operates as a mostly unspoken premise behind many of the most powerful political movements today. It is present in one form or another on both the political right and the political left, but it appears in such different forms that it’s hard to recognize it as a common pattern. But once the pattern is identified, I think it’s almost undeniable because all the evidence is openly visible.

The idea is this: the human race is doomed … and must be doomed.

A tent-pole studio movie currently in theaters, 2012, takes a fanciful interpretation of the Mayan Calendar and shows us the destruction of the earth. This is standard literary and dramatic fare, although usually a small, intrepid group of humans manages to survive the overall destruction of the human race, whether it’s from an astronomical collision with some extraterrestrial body hurtling toward us, or our lack of ecological sense destroying our environment, or our failure to curb total warfare due to our building Weapons of Mass Destruction, or something goes wrong with the Sun, or the Earth’s Core, and so forth. Or maybe it’s a plague of Zombies that gets us, or Invaders from somewhere else. Whether through natural disaster, or enemies bigger and badder than we are, or our own bad habits, the disaster novel and the disaster movie are solid constructs of the human imagination.

Our most common religions in the Western World — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — all have their end-of-the-world scenarios. The Rapture, the Apocalypse, Armageddon, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and the destruction of Heaven and the creation of a New Heaven are all prophecies from the Book of Revelation sincerely believed by many Christians … including the most recent Vice Presidential Candidate of the Republican Party, who’s now on a book tour promoting her new autobiography. One has to wonder how such beliefs can be kept out of foreign policy discussions regarding Israel when theology demands that Israeli Jews accomplish certain specific tasks before the Christian Savior can return.

But the left is not only filled with its own apocalyptic theories, I would say these theories have entirely conquered and now dominate the original Marxist, anarchist, and labor-movement theories that used to propel leftist activism. Marxism was a theory of worker empowerment and escape from economic exploitation, anarchism of human freedom from all forms of domination and exploitation, syndicalism of direct worker take-over of the means of production. But all of these movements on the left were, in theory, life-affirming and looked forward to utopian human societies here on earth. They might have wanted to destroy capitalism, but the object was always to replace capitalism with a workers’ paradise. In theory, at least, they were humanists.

Even when the left identified class enemies and attempted to eliminate them — capitalists, kulaks, the bourgeoisie, anarchists, Trotskyists, deviationists, the Jews — these unwanted human beings were always intended to be replaced with a better class of people: New Communist Man.

The Old Left did not have, as its enemy, the human species, itself.

Even the Nazis — out to eliminate communists, capitalists, homosexuals, the mentally unfit, Gypsies, Catholics, anarchists, and of course the Jews — had it in mind that they needed extra living space for a better class of people: Aryans.

Even Nazis didn’t want to kill off human beings per se. They just wanted to replace other human beings with more like themselves.

Unlike the old Communists and Nazis, the elimination of human beings is precisely what much of the left has as its primary agenda today. And even though I’m bourgeois, anarchistic, capitalistic, and Jewish, I prefer old Communists and Nazis who don’t want to kill all human beings over their replacements on the left today who do.

The religious right — who seem to be looking forward to the Apocalypse, if not actually working to bring it on — give me scant comfort with their theology that sinful humanity will be left behind, as my agnostic friend Brad Linaweaver has explained to me, in favor of Perfected Sin-Free Man — obviously where the Communists and Nazis got their ideas of human perfection.

I don’t believe in human perfection in the sense that I believe any conscious being with free will — including Saints, including Angels, and including God — lacks the capacity to do evil. Volition by its very nature allows for doing evil, and even if one lives eternally that will be an eternal moment-by-moment choice. To eliminate that choice is to eliminate the divinity of the free soul. Our perfection, if any, is merely becoming wiser and mastering self-control. Even if men become gods we won’t be any less human.

But perfecting humans into supermen is the old, atavistic cause. These days eliminating human beings without a replacement model is the new cause.

You might think at this point that I’m making this up, or being sarcastic, or blowing things out of proportion, or making a mountain out of a molehill.

Let’s just see.

Paul R. Ehrlich, in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, is generally considered the father of the Zero Population Growth movement, with his predictions of near-future famines if human population growth wasn’t stemmed. Like the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus in his late eighteenth/early nineteenth century book An Essay on the Principle of Population, Erlich believed human beings would breed themselves into abject poverty if population growth wasn’t forcibly restricted. The ideas of Malthus and Erlich have been so dominant that they represent a turning point in modern Western culture, away from families with multiple children to couples either forgoing children entirely, choosing to have only one, or using contraception until later in life when pregnancies are both harder to achieve and more problematic.

But Malthus and Erlich, at least as far as we know, favored population control so those remaining human beings could have a richer, fuller life.

Today the object isn’t even to restrict population growth but actually to reduce the population of human beings to a fraction of its current size by any means possible. The object has changed from “the greatest good for a lesser number” to “human beings suck and let’s get rid of them.”

All of our cultural attitudes regarding the continuing propagation of the human species today find their reflection in the goal of deferred reproduction and hostility to fecundity. Teenage pregnancy — that is, pregnancy at the ages human females are biologically most capable of getting pregnant easily and less likely to give birth to monsters — is discouraged both as public policy and social attitudes.

Note well: There is just as much hostility to teenage pregnancy on the mainstream Christian right today — even by young married couples whose union is sanctified by their church — as there is on the secular left.

For all their talk about being Pro-Life, the religious right doesn’t actually like healthy babies — which most often come from young mothers — any more than the secular left does.

In the United States and most European countries middle-class and affluent couples tend to have very few babies and if it were not for immigration from poorer countries, and Muslims who believe in larger families, the overall population would be declining.

In Israel the secular Jewish population seems intent on foiling Sarah Palin’s plans for the Christian Messiah’s return by not having enough babies even to replace themselves. Meanwhile, Arabic Muslims seem quite capable of human reproduction. Perhaps the Pentacostals will eventually reinterpret scripture and define the Palestinian Arabs as the biblical Hebrews who will rebuild the Temple of Solomon, one of the signs of the Lord’s return. I once suggested something similar to this idea in a short story I wrote titled “Day of Atonement.”

Homosexuality is encouraged by elites, I believe, not out of any actual empathy, but simply because gay couples are disabled when it comes to natural reproduction.

Similarly, abortion is a cause célèbre among the progressive left not because they give an actual damn about the rights of women to control their own bodies — the lie is exposed by the continuing indifference among the progressive left to legalizing prostitution — but because abortion eliminates live births and hence additional human beings.

That toxic segment of the Green movement which I’ve lately tagged the Gangrene Movement is entirely hostile to the expansion of human habitats, human industry, human welfare, and large human populations. Gangrenes favor protecting “endangered animal species” over farms and fisheries that produce food for humans. They’ve promulgated the now-proven fraud of global warming to cripple the production of fossil-fuel energy necessary to produce abundant food, housing, industries, transportation, and recreation. All their policies oppose a luxuriant human life. Their agendas foil eliminating poverty by making the poor wealthy consumers. The evolutionary biologist, Sir Julian Huxley — a quintessential Gangrene — once wrote that, “Human beings will be the cancer of the planet.” As Brad Linaweaver has replied, “I’m proud to be a human cancer cell.”

The animal rights movement, as I have written earlier, has no actual concern for the welfare of animals but merely uses animals for the leverage it gives them in redirecting charities given to disadvantaged human beings towards animals instead. PETA’s own animal shelters kill as many pets as any other pound. Their claims to moral superiority because they feed off vegetation rather than animals is disingenuous. As Dennis Prager has discovered by polling his radio audience, many of these “morally superior vegetarians” would save their drowning pet before they would save a drowning baby. David Foreman of Earth First!, in Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, wrote: “Human suffering resulting from drought and famine in Ethiopia is tragic, yes, but the destruction there of other creatures and habitat is even more tragic.” A clearer statement of abject human self-hatred under color of animal love does not exist anywhere.

The hatred of humanity finds its way into all culture: replacing music that comes from the heart with percussive and repetitive industrial techno that sounds like the chompers in Galaxy Quest, to stage plays like Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class which revels in the destruction of any human aspiration toward betterment, to museum installations which mock any art drawn from human sentiment with mere attempts to engorge the loins or engage the gag reflex, to movies which trash nobility and celebrate trash.

It was Friedrich Nietzsche who wrote about “men without chests” — human beings with intellect and hormones but no passion, and this hostility to the human heart has grown to its ultimate expression of anti-humanism with an organization that openly campaigns for the end of the human race.

The Voluntary Human Extermination Movement — VHEMT — has its website at http://www.vhemt.org/.

Under cover of claiming to be humanitarians like Malthus and Erlich concerned with improving the human condition through population reduction, VHEMT contains within its statement of purpose: “the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo sapiens… us.”

Conspiracies happen in secret. Everything I’ve pointed to in this essay is right out in the open. It’s all in Wikipedia. They have their own websites.

Didn’t believe me, did you? You thought I was exaggerating.