I suppose you could retcon this as Spock's attempt to control himself using psychology: Vulcan mind over matter.
Vulcan Emotions
- Thread starter AmandaSmith
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I suppose you could retcon this as Spock's attempt to control himself using psychology: Vulcan mind over matter.
Well, in The Cage Spock was literally not written that way. GR didn't come up with the idea beyond the pointed ears until Where No Man Has Gone Before. Nimoy wasn't going to be the co-star at that point.
There is the acceptance of Spock as an unreliable narrator.
But that still leads us to: Vulcans have emotions. Humans have emotions. Spock has emotions. What the hell was Spock's problem? And why did it take Vejur to solve it?
That he never felt like he belonged. On the Enterprise he kind of did, but was always an outsider. On Vulcan he was teased and called names. He felt he had to be the best at what he did, and control the raging inferno within by pushing it down. More British style stoicism than classic stoicism.
Spock was outright bullied during his childhood (as we saw in the TAS episode "Yesteryear"). Of course he never felt he truly belonged, as the Vulcans looked down on him for his human side and his Starfleet colleagues had no idea how to perceive or "read" Vulcan body language and cues to understand the nuances of what he was and was not communicating, as he didn't show emotions as humans would.
While that certainly makes sense it's not what we were ever presented with. When he has his epiphany in sick bay he says that Vejur can't FEEL. He went for Kolinar because it was about emotions. In TOS it's always about Vulcans don't feel and maybe he might.
He felt that he had to control "the raging inferno" because he grew up on a whole planet where they all did just that. And for some reason he couldn't.
If they had gone another route, where Spock looked different from the other Vulcanians, then maybe there would have been some reason for him to be outcast based on his appearance. But it wasn't that so there had to be some way that he acted differently than his peers.
Or Vulcans are just across the board jerks. All of them. Teachers, students, mail carriers, the whole rotten lot.
"You don't understand the Vulcan way, Captain. It's logical. It's a better way than ours." Boy was she guzzling the Kool-Aid.
Except with the examples shown that Vulcans do have emotions, and they are a part of their history, so at least part of it is that Vulcans can feel but choose not to, by whatever mechanism they ascribed too.
Yeah, that line definitely comes across way more poorly now.
Taking larger Trek lore into account, it seems like there would be something of a cargo-cult mentality about Vulcans, to at least some of Earth. They stepped in, if not at Earth's darkest hour, certainly before the break of dawn and provided a lot of help. It's easy to imagine people trying earnestly to convert to a Vulcan lifestyle, but almost certainly never being able to achieve their goal. The Vulcans believe their own propoganda when it comes to their way of life, and there would be advantages to trying to sell a species like the humans on it, when they have so many common features and similar histories.
Being a telepathic species, perhaps there are things that Vulcans pick up on their wavelengths that Humans aren't sensitive to; different, discordant aspects of Spock that only Vulcans would notice.
I’ve read fanfics that posit that perhaps the difference is that humans physically need to vent our feelings. We get headaches or ulcers or higher risks for heart conditions etc. if we don’t express our feelings and perhaps that isn’t true for Vulcans. Physically they can handle repressing their emotions even though they are more volatile but we humans, even if given the same training, can’t follow it without harming ourselves.
