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Are Vulcans just trained to be narcissists?

Doctor K

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I know this is triggering to fans but I see Tuvok on Voyager, erasing love from his consciousness and bragging that he knows "neither joy nor sorrow" Does this Kohlinaru really mean that he would feel no remorse for doing something really bad? I watched a video recently of a narcissist confessing how she saw relationships as a chess game that she was determined to win. She scammed a guy out of $150,000 and figured "Hey, you fool, you didn't see through me, so you deserve it."
I hate to think of Vulcans this way but a life devoted to the cold calculation of logic is very prone to the temptations of narcissism.
 
I hate to think of Vulcans this way but a life devoted to the cold calculation of logic is very prone to the temptations of narcissism.

No. Vulcans are just as varied as humans. According to the novels, very few actually end up going through Kolinahr, just like they have a group that embrace emotion in the V'tosh Ka'tur (Enterprise, "Fusion").
 
Not all. The baseball dude from the DS9 game definitely was. Dr Selar from TNG was not. Shame she only had one appearance. Spock wasn't, but nonemotion could have been misperceived as such...?
 
Tuvok was a fascinating character because he was so not like Spock. Spock had a tendency to show a dry sense of humor but Tuvok was straight forward in everything he said. No exaggerating the truth or whatever, Tuvok didn't lie. He also stirred my thinking not every Vulcan had to be a science/ medical officer; they can be anything in the Star Trek Universe. I wish more actors would challenge themselves and explore a Vulcan character than aping off the performance of Leonard Nimoy. Tim Russ was awesome.
 
One of Tuvok's best scenes is in "Hunters", where Neelix is reading his letter to him, to his annoyance... after Neelix leaves, Tuvok momentarily returns his attention to the report in his hand... then looks at the letter, then sets the report aside and turns his attention to the letter. For one moment in his ordered, logical life, emotion clashes with logic... and he lets emotion win.
 
Recent Trek shows are doing a lot to diversify Vulcans.

Discovery had the Vulcan President T‘Rina struggling with putting duty over self interests/her love life with Saru and ultimately discovering that it‘s workable to do both.

SNW obviously does a lot to flesh out individual Vulcan‘s Spock and T‘Pring as People with desires, personal interests and a strong sense of honor and duty and friendship, as well as give insights into broader social structures.
Several „deviant“ Vulcans are shown that are clashing with the dominant culture and how they may or may not wish to be (re)integrated.

Picard had
the most crass depiction of a crime lord Vulcan justifying his actions logically as a necessary counter pole to utopian society, while really being a cruel and narcissistic individual. But he was still „reasonable“ with a bleeding out Worf holding a blade to his throat.
 
Tuvok was a fascinating character because he was so not like Spock. Spock had a tendency to show a dry sense of humor but Tuvok was straight forward in everything he said. No exaggerating the truth or whatever, Tuvok didn't lie. He also stirred my thinking not every Vulcan had to be a science/ medical officer; they can be anything in the Star Trek Universe. I wish more actors would challenge themselves and explore a Vulcan character than aping off the performance of Leonard Nimoy. Tim Russ was awesome.

Agreed with everything except for one thing.

Tuvok did show a dry sense of humor at times, interspersed with some condescension in a few other times.

For example, in "THINK TANK", when Tuvok was correcting some work that ends up showing Kurros instead of a Malon, he tells the Doctor, "Brace yourself." It was a direct comeback from the Doctor saying the same thing only a minute ago when he thought it was a Malon.

Moments like that definitely show the dry humor/snark of Tuvok, which was something Spock did... particularly with McCoy.
 
No. Vulcans are just as varied as humans. According to the novels, very few actually end up going through Kolinahr, just like they have a group that embrace emotion in the V'tosh Ka'tur (Enterprise, "Fusion").

I wonder wat happened to them and whether they still exist in the 24th century?
 
Narcissists are highly emotional when challenged.

Maybe you meant “sociopaths” instead.

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Had to.
 
Not at all. Vulcans feel emotions, they just learn to suppress them and make their decisions using a form of logic that is intrinsically altruistic. That’s different from being incapable of empathy.

Not experiencing empathy and not letting your feelings of empathy cloud your judgement in pursuing the greater good are two different things.

Like, in stories where the hero gives the villain the one thing they need to destroy the world because they are holding their loved one. A logical Vulcan would not hand it over, not because they don’t care about saving the loved one, but because the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
 
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Like, in stories where the hero gives the villain the one thing they need to destroy the world because they are holding their loved one.
And then the world gets destroyed and the loved one dies with it.
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And then the world gets destroyed and the loved one dies with it.
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That’s why it’s such a silly trope but nine times out of ten the hero will make the trade.

Even Jack Bauer would risk disaster if anyone got a gun to his daughter’s head.
 
I apologize for the long post. Throw tomatoes, but please use ripe ones.

There isn't going to be a consistent Vulcan morality, because there won't be consistent acting or writing for them, which is good, because consistency would tend to imply they were hive minded, which clearly they are not.

elements of their philosophy:
stoicism: emotional responses are judgements and therefore subjective and flawed. judgements must be reviewed before acting upon and then handling in a manner determined to be virtuous. Vulcans take this to the extreme by suppressing emotions wherever possible. This may seem unhealthy for humans, but Vulcans are not humans. Emotional suppression discipline became part of the broader reforms of Surak in the wake of a nuclear holocaust. There is no reason to believe he invented it, any more than he could have invented logic, but perhaps he popularized it. Vulcans are shown to enjoy a life of luxury, art, exploration, and trade. In this they seem more to fit the stoic model of Seneca rather than Cato the Younger.

relativism: The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the One. This implies Vulcans will weigh the benefits of decisions in terms of their affects on the greater good. Here the Stoicism of Zeno meets the relativism of John Stuart Mill. Or does it? Was this a Vulcan teaching, really, or was it part of Spock's personal rule of life?

Kantianism: Vulcans are shown at times to have extreme inflexibility in their opinions (except when they are not), implying at least some Vulcans employ Reason as a final arbiter of good, living by maxims without exception. The old thought experiment of Kant lying to the murderer a the door, juxtaposed with constant examples of Vulcan deception, again implies while this is an ideal many Vulcans aspire to, it is not the pragmatism they ultimately apply in daily life.

historical trends 1: a mark has to be made in the timeline dividing the apparent vindication of the Syrranites against the prevailing mainstream legalism that had predated it for some years. This legalism sought to maintain an uncomfortable balance between Vulcan traditionalism at the sacrifice of many spiritual practices, while functioning on behalf of state reforms. These were seen as necessary in the wake of outside aggression and the astonishing rapid development of neighboring species. That it may have been influenced by Romulan infiltration does not make it less valid, as it could be argued that Vulcan Society was headed in this direction anyway, by the natural course of events. The fact that even sacred monasteries could be co-opted into intelligence gathering by the State by this point shows the decline in the Vulcan spirituality, in its purist forms now reduced to itinerant cults such as the aforementioned Syrranites and the V'tosh ka'tur. Indeed, a century after the event of the discovery of Surak's original teachings, the traditionalist-legalist factions had not entirely disappeared, as evidenced by the suicide bombing of Sarek's shuttle.

historical trends 2: by the 31st century, Vulcan and Romulan cultures were re-merging after millennia. It's not known entirely what affect that may have, but it will change the combined philosophy, albeit with holdouts from both groups (species?). The isolation of Post-Burn galactic society may reduce cultural contamination from neighbors such as Earth causing a new homogeny to influence trends.
 
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