Hardihood Books Roundup - June, 2025
Welcome to Summer
Hi,
Welcome to the Hardihood Books June Roundup. I hope your summer is off to a good start.
In Case You Missed It:
First, I published the second half of “You Don’t Exist.” I did keep this outside the paywall, so everyone can read it. Perhaps I’m too heavy-handed, but readers can judge for themselves. Originally, I had a very different ending in mind, but halfway through I realized where the story was going and followed it to the logical conclusion. Every time I’m inclined to think I’m too on the nose in my defense of freedom and criticism of autocracy, I read something like this article from Jay Nordlinger about an escaped North Korean dissident. And I’m reminded that there are parts of the world where these questions aren’t abstract. Too many of us, I think, don’t stop often enough to realize how lucky we are to live in free societies.
I published two more installments in War in the Galaxy. Two of these four chapters ended up being rather longer than I had anticipated, but I will hopefully make up for that with some shorter chapters in the future. The story of Gurney and Heni took what I had planned as a short detour and what has now become a multi-chapter saga which is as yet unfinished. Special Agent Lilia Trasker’s story took some interesting twists, but I’m successfully moving it in the direction I need it to go. At the rate the story is going, it will still be in full swing by the end of the year.
The second half of “Their Private Happiness,” went behind the paywall as promised. I’ll be curious to know how readers respond to it. In many ways, it continues some of the themes I’ve been developing for years, but in others it is quite different from my usual fare.
I published another essay on individualism, this one fairly short. It continues a line of defense I feel personally compelled to make, that groupishness and extraversion are not inherently unselfish and introversion and being a loner aren’t inherently selfish. This isn’t in the essay, but I heard sometime in the last year a statistic on what is sometimes called the “loneliness epidemic,” that many of the people who spend lots of time by themselves don’t say they’re lonely in response to surveys. It’s the people who are surrounded by others who don’t understand them who respond saying they’re lonely. For evolutionary reasons, the individual by him- or herself is generally viewed with suspicion. And, indeed, “it is not good for man to be alone.”1 But much of the greatest evil is done by people who claim to be acting for their victims’ own good. Much of it has been done ostensibly in the name of community and the common good.2 Perhaps we should have some skepticism towards that.
Finally, I released another essay on technology. This one is free to everyone. I’m often a critic of digital technology, but some of the claims of my fellow travelers on the skeptic side are so ridiculous I feel compelled to reject them. And there are some things I rather like about modern technology, often the things most people love. Amazon, for one, has been a tremendous benefit to the human race. But I’ll be driving my own car until they pry the steering wheel from my cold, dead fingers.
From the Archive:
Last year, I published, “In the Summertime” in two parts. It ended up much darker than I anticipated (as I noted in my roundup last year), but I still think I hit the right themes.
In Closing:
You can email me, or reach out via Twitter (@benconnelly6712) or LinkedIn. You can also follow me on Notes.
Thank you for reading and subscribing.
Cheers,
Ben Connelly
What does God do after he says this? He solves it by giving Adam a wife. Later he tells them to “be fruitful and multiply.” In other words, he creates the family. Not the state or the society or anything else.
Critics will claim that this was just boilerplate rhetoric to justify the selfish ambitions and aggrandizement of terrible individuals. But many evil men believed their rhetoric. Che and Castro really believed they were making the world a better place. Stalin slept on a cot. He believed he was building a utopia. Mussolini thought he was building a new, holistic form of society that would be a more nurturing alternative to alienating democratic capitalism.
Nicely done, Ben!