Was Kirk Lying?

In Catspaw, Kirk and party are the captives of Korob and Sylvia, in a attempt to bribe Kirk, Korob places plates of jewels on the table that Kirk is seat at.

Korob: "Diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires. All the crystalline forms that you cherish above all things."

Kirk responses with: "We could manufacture a ton of these on our ship. They mean nothing to us."

Now was Kirk telling the truth, or was he lying? Korob's source of information concerning the value of the jewels would have been the minds three people who originally beamed down, and who they gain control of.

If the minds of Scott, Sulu and Jackson held the current esteem and value placed on jewels, this would have been where Korob obtain this knowledge.

Kirk wasn't about to be bribed, not into abandoning Scott and Sulu to people who had already killed Jackson. Kirk is the master of the bluff, if the jewels in fact still held high value in the 23rd century to Humanity, Kirk wasn't about to tell Korob this.

Or, Korob's mind reading was in fact flawed, diamonds, rubies, emeralds and sapphires formally were of value, but no longer, they can be manufacture with such ease that they hold the value of a sack of dime store marbles.

Truth or lie?

 

This, although I believe you mean "formerly," not "formally," just to clarify. ("Formally" means something else.)

Korob was tapping into old myths and archetypes in the crew members' minds, not modern-day information on the Federation's current technology and economy. Hence, ghost and witches and fabulous treasures . . .the stuff of old legends, of dubious relevance to the 23rd century.

 

Possible answer: Sylvia and Korob drew on their captives' emotions, on the cultural archetypes and myths that resonated with them viscerally, rather than on their factual knowledge. That's why we got a haunted castle with witches and skeletons and black cats. On a factual level, Scott, Sulu, and Jackson knew there were no witches or haunted castles and that black cats are no different than any other kind; but it was the archetypal, emotional symbolism of those things that the aliens tapped into and expected the landing party to respond to.

By the same token, jewels have been cultural archetypes of wealth and preciousness throughout history, and those archetypes and emotional resonances will remain in our stories and lore even after reality renders them moot. So just as with the haunted-house imagery, Sylvia and Korob were attuned to the ancient emotional/cultural archetypes in the backs of the humans' minds and were surprised when the humans reacted with modern, rational thinking instead.

EDIT: Looks like Greg and I were on the same page.

 

Could have been just as flawed and imperfect (form without substance) as Trelane's.

 

This has been sort of addressed before! In Arena Kirk says that the rocks and stuff around him would be a minerologists dream especially with the hard diamonds he finds, but in Catspaw he says they could make such trinkets and they mean nothing! So is that Kirk bluffing or bad script writing?
JB

 

SMALL CHICKEN PUPPETS!

 

he was probably telling the truth about being able to manufacture gems
I would think natural ones would still have some kind of value to some people though

 

That's no contradiction, because mineralogists aren't interested in the monetary value of gems, but their scientific significance.

True, he did say it was a small fortune in diamonds, but that's problematical even in real-world terms, since diamonds aren't actually all that rare or intrinsically valuable. The whole idea of diamonds as precious stones is basically a fiction the diamond cartels manufactured by artificially limiting the supply in order to drive up prices (and by using elaborate marketing to create the whole diamonds = romance idea in order to create demand). Assuming the De Beers cartel isn't still engaged in the same scam 250 years from now, Kirk would have no reason to consider diamonds all that precious, even without the ability to synthesize them by the bucketful. (Which, by the way, is an ability we already have.)

 

Maybe it's both - the Enterprise can manufacture gems by the bucketful, but that doesn't mean that the crew has access to them, to keep them for themselves. So, the jewels could be prized, Karob's info could be correct, and Jim could also be telling the truth.

 

Maybe they got wires crossed and meant to show him dilithium crystals instead.

 

Korob: Oh. Well, if these don't please you, perhaps this bushel of dilithium crystals.

Kirk: We can manufa-- Oh. Well, all right then. You've got a deal.

 

Wait until Kirk finds out they secretly replaced those dilithium crystals with new Folger's crystals. Will he be able to spot the difference? Let's watch.

 

Kirk will never find out. It will be one of the perks of working in engineering. The Java programmers will never let on, either.

 

This is about what I was thinking, even now they can produce industrial grade diamonds, but cut gems are more expensive. So I'm thinking that they may have been worth something to someone, but not to him.

Somewhere in the middle.

 

Well, humans no longer use money so the gems may not be worth anything.

 

^Right. They clearly used money in TOS. The first "no money" reference was in The Voyage Home, and it wasn't really embraced as an idea until TNG.

 

And that can be handwaved away to mean a cashless society, not a non monetary society.

 

Really, people speaking about money doesn't mean they would use money, any more than people speaking about religion would use that... The "credits to Navy beans" might have been a DeSalle family phrase from back when there still was such a thing as a Navy, which was a bit after they abolished credits!

As for "Arena" and diamonds, perhaps Kirk finds the fortune "incredible" because the credibility of this deposit is close to zero?

Timo Saloniemi

 

That's funny, Jim never has a second cup of dilithium at home...