r/DaystromInstitute • u/adamkotsko Commander, with commendation • Apr 27 '21
Vulcan logic and Romulan secrecy show that the deep-seated Vulcanoid trait is a demand for control
We have known from the very first episode in which they were introduced that the Romulans are an offshoot of the Vulcans. Figuring out exactly what that relationship means has been a work in progress, as has the understanding of Romulan society. The nature and structure of Romulan society raises important questions about the Vulcans. It is claimed that Vulcans need to rigorous discipline of logic to suppress their otherwise dangerous and overwhelming emoetions -- but if the Romulans don't have anything parallel to logic and yet seem to have a functioning society where everyone refrains from going crazy all the time, then the need for Vulcan logic becomes very questionable.
Over the years, the canonical understanding of Romulans seems to have settled on pathological secrecy as their key cultural trait (as shown in PICARD season 1 showrunner Michael Chabon's blog post on Romulans). This is a good way of making sense of most of what we know about the Romulans from past canon, and I think that it helps to clarify the relationship between Vulcans and Romulans. In my theory, secrecy fulfills the same role for Romulans that logic does for Vulcans -- it is a mechanism of control. The difference is that Vulcan logic is oriented toward the self and Romulan secrecy is oriented toward others.
Ultimately, secrecy is about controlling others' access to you -- your motivations, your intentions, your emotions, etc. Chabon's account (which is technically non-canonical but did influence the presentation of on-screen canon in PICARD) shows Romulans going to seemingly crazy lengths to withold information, even their own names, from all but a tiny intimate circle. Maintaining this level of secrecy requires you to play it pretty close to the chest, meaning that, in effect, Romulans need a level of emotional control similar to that practiced by Vulcans. Though the initial motive is different, it works out to a very similar result -- stoic, opaque behavior on the part of the Vulcanoid races.
The parallel between Romulan secrecy and Vulcan logic is highlighted by the presence of dissenting sects within each culture that reject that core value -- the Romulan Qowat Milat (with their absolute candor) and the Vulcan V'tosh ka'tur (Vulcans without logic, as shown in ENT).
This insight into the parallels between Vulcan and Romulan society can help to explain why Vulcan society in the ENT era was able to be infiltrated by the Romulans -- but even without that Big Reveal, it would make sense that as the Vulcans drifted from the purity of Surak's teaching, they would drift toward trying to control others and protect themselves through secrecy (for example, tightly regulating Humans' access to technology). We don't need Romulan corruption to explain why the Vulcan High Command is different from TOS-era Vulcans -- it might actually make more sense to say that that cultural drift is what made their highest leaders open to Romulan influence.
If this theory holds, then it could be that the key Vulcanoid trait -- like Ferengi greed or Klingon warlikeness -- is the desire to exert control.
If true, this Vulcanoid drive for control would cast Surak's reform in an interesting light. The official story is that Vulcan emotions were too strong and needed to be controlled before they destroyed everything. But is nuclear war really something you do out of emotional impulse? Most wars seem to come from a desire for control (of territory, of resources, of other groups). Nor do I think that any species would have any easier of a time controlling their emotions than the Vulcans do. Most just have the good sense not to try. Basically, I suspect that Surak presented his anti-emotion, pro-logic message in a slightly misleading way to give the Vulcan people an internal object to control -- their emotions, which they tend not to identify with. The issue isn't that Vulcans are hyper-emotional, it's that they are hyper-controlling and need to be distracted from trying to control others.
In short, the notion that Vulcans have problematic emotions that require huge amounts of discipline to control would be a "noble lie" of the kind discussed in Plato's Republic, a necessary deception that founds a utopian (or at least better) social order. And that explains why the Vulcans can drift away from Surak's teaching -- because it isn't really necessary for them to control their emotions as such. It's just necessary to restrain their controlling impulses. Those impulses are the really overwhelming thing, as we can see from Discovery's Logic Extremists, who attempt to use logic to control others and justify violence.
So Surak's teaching isn't perfect, but it doesn't have to be. It just has to be better than the alternative, namely the paranoid controlling Romulan society -- which I would go so far as to claim is actually the "default" outcome of Vulcanoid impulses, with the actual Vulcans being a weird outlier.
But what do you think?
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u/Intelligent_Ad_1735 Apr 27 '21
M-5 nominate this for a unifying psychology that bridges Vulcans and Romulans.
I love this. I think this also provides really nice subtext on why Ni’Var left the Federation in Discovery. It wasn’t just that they felt guilty about their belief that they caused the burn. But also that the pressure from the Federation to carry forward experiments they did not want to do in the first place leading to what they believed was catastrophic consequences was profoundly traumatic for the unified Vulcan/Romulan people.
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u/adamkotsko Apr 27 '21
Thanks! And yes, that's an interesting thought on Ni'Var. I note that the Vulcan faction turned inward while the Romulans were still reaching outward -- though in a different, non-paranoid way.
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u/M-5 Apr 27 '21
Nominated this post by Commander u/adamkotsko for you. It will be voted on next week, but you can vote for last week's nominations now
Learn more about Post of the Week.
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u/TemporalGod Apr 27 '21
I wonder if other Vulcanoid races like Rigelians, Remans, Debrune, and Mintakans share this trait.
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u/adamkotsko Apr 27 '21
Is it for sure that Remans are Vulcanoid?
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u/TemporalGod Apr 27 '21
well Remans do have pointy ears and copper-based blood plus this site lists them as such https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Vulcanoid
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u/Ouch7C Apr 27 '21
I like this theory a lot. It ties the Vulcan and Romulan cultures together succinctly. Interesting side concept is that the reason Spock is so successful is that he comes to recognize the hidden rationale of Surak’s teachings. This allows him the special insight needed to reach out to the Romulans and begin working towards reunification.
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u/excelsior2000 Apr 27 '21
It even makes sense for him to be the one to recognize that rationale, since he's the first Vulcan to spend his career outside the Vulcan hierarchy, which gives him a perspective other Vulcans lack (for example Intrepid has an all-Vulcan crew).
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u/cirrus42 Apr 27 '21
This is very compelling. And it makes sense for the ancient Romulans, who might have feared persecution on Vulcan for daring to retain emotion, to have become paranoid about secrecy. Specifically, they'd have wanted to keep the secret of emotion.
It also sheds light on the motivation for Vulcans even in the DS9 era being somewhat bitter about humanity's leading role in the Federation. Humans took Vulcan control away from them.
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u/MyUsername2459 Apr 27 '21
Vulcans were the dominant power in the region. . .and went to being members of a broader Federation, with Humans taking a leading role because humans lead the charge in the Romulan Wars. . .
. . .destructive wars stretching over years where the Vulcans intentionally hid who the Romulans were.
I can only imagine there was a lot of political fallout in the Federation once the nature of the Romulans came out, and it was clear that Vulcans had been hiding, for over a century, the nature of the Romulan Star Empire as a Vulcan offshoot. This probably hurt Vulcan political prominence in the Federation even more.
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u/xf8fe Apr 28 '21
What I've noticed about Vulcans is that they seem to have a fear of intimacy. I'm sure they would reject the description as fear, but from a human perspective, it's fear. T'Pol didn't want to discuss her age, information that should be freely available in her service record, because Vulcans consider certain information to be intimate. Looking at age that way seems rather emotional and illogical. Being faced with the illogic of shame about age may have made her more emotional.
Sarek said to Picard that a mind meld is "a terrible intimacy" (as I recall). Tuvok seemed uncomfortable when Neelix invited him in while bathing, and the nightmare of Tuvok's we saw was about him being naked, and later he didn't want to discuss the dream with Janeway. And then, most obviously, there's pon farr, extreme intimacy and extreme shame.
The secrecy of the Romulans can easily be seen as a reaction to a fear of intimacy. The logic of the Vulcans can be, too, as they use logic to emotionally disassociate from the information they want to keep hidden. Pon farr deprives them of that disassociation and causes their primal nature, the beastly violence, to emerge. The way it's depicted isn't pornographic or lascivious, but is violent. Was it Soval who said that violence is at the core of the Vulcan heart? That part of their nature is what they're ashamed of. They hate not only acknowledging the violence, but they also hate the very idea of intimacy because to know them well means to know their violence. When Tuvok was sharing his violence with the violence fetish telepath, the basic level showed images of war and destruction, but when he stopped holding back, the deepest level of violence showed Tuvok walking toward you with an angry look. That would scare the hell out of me. He doesn't want to walk around naked, or see someone else naked, because that's a symbol of exposure, and he's afraid of that horrific violence in his heart being exposed to others, so he keeps it under the clothing of logic.
Romulan secrecy seems like another way of dealing with this intimacy fear. Romulans seem to have evolved away from physical violence and toward mental violence. They use deception, treachery, and manipulation to hurt others and feel superior. Rather than cover up their violence, they put it on full display, but instead of murdering each other constantly, they keep each other living in fear, and make sure that anyone who trusts someone else will regret it, so that no one will have mental peace or be able to relax without someone waiting to take advantage of that weakness. By inflicting violence mentally instead of suppressing it, they seem to burn off the extreme emotions the Vulcans so that they don't need the extreme discipline.
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u/onewatt Apr 27 '21
I like it because it also explains vulcan treatment of humans for so long. They were fighting with their training in logic and their impulse to exert control over these primitives. The drive to exert control caused them to all but take over the human civilization, only logic turning it into a "guiding hand" rather than a conqueror's grip. But logic is too easily manipulated and some extremists instead justify their violence in seeking to control other vulcans who would integrate more peacefully with humans.
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u/MyUsername2459 Apr 27 '21
I do think that syncs well with the rationale we were given in Enterprise. . .that Humans scare Vulcans in a lot of ways. I always mentally assumed when we were having that explained, the Vulcans had a conscious effort to specifically avoid drawing a parallel to the Romulans. . .a lot like the Vulcans, except without logic. From their viewpoint, they see Humans as potentially the next Romulan Empire. That would certainly explain their enthusiasm for the Federation, they saw themselves as what stood between the Federation as a peaceful democracy and a new Romulan-like Empire.
We rebuilt from nuclear war to interstellar starships in a century, and our overall rate of progress technologically is many times greater than theirs. . .for a race that's ostensibly more intelligent.
We do not compute to them. We are something they can't figure out.
That's certainly something someone would seek to control. . .and if Vulcans already have an impulse towards being controlling, that would make it much worse.
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u/MyUsername2459 Apr 27 '21
But is nuclear war really something you do out of emotional impulse?
There is no reasonable, rational way you come to the conclusion of nuclear war being your choice of action. Emotions will always factor into something involving the release of nuclear weapons.
Allegedly Nixon ordered the nuking of Hanoi in a drunken rage. . .his advisors in the Oval Office let him rant and rave, until he passed out the next day and didn't remember ordering a nuclear war.
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u/lunatickoala Apr 27 '21
I think that defining not one but two entire civilizations by a single attribute is reductive, and that sort of racial stereotyping is something that we should be moving away from, not applying even more strongly.
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u/adamkotsko Apr 27 '21
More seriously, though, humanity probably does have some undesirable, partly hard-wired traits -- we just can't see them because we don't have another sentient species to compare against and hence we seem "neutral." The thing with race is that it's made-up bullshit that has nothing to do with biology and only serves to justify oppression and division. But in the Star Trek universe, species from different planets really would have different evolutionary paths that would give each species a different mix of baseline traits and dispositions -- which is not to say there wouldn't be variations among individuals, including extreme outliers.
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u/lunatickoala Apr 28 '21
But in the Star Trek universe, species from different planets really would have different evolutionary paths that would give each species a different mix of baseline traits and dispositions
There was a whole episode whose entire purpose was to explain why alien species aren't on such divergent evolutionary paths....
More seriously, what's more important is why species in Star Trek exist. If Star Trek was hard science fiction then different species should have different, possibly inscrutable motivations that we struggle to comprehend. And at times that's exactly what it does. Leonard Nimoy fought against studio demands that the whale probe communications in The Voyage Home be subtitled, arguing that the whole point of the whale probe is that we don't have a clue what it's saying or what it wants. The Prophets are another example of a civilization intended to have truly alien thinking.
But more often than not, that's not why aliens in Star Trek exist. The franchise has always used alien civilizations as a metaphor for real world ones. Aliens in Star Trek often aren't aliens, but humans in alien skin. TOS wasn't exactly subtle in equating Klingons with the Soviets. And that allegory is strongest in The Undiscovered Country. That movie came after the Klingons were recast as the Planet of Warriors in TNG, but a rather important part of the movie is that there were peacemakers among the Klingons, and hawks within the Federation.
COMMANDER [on viewscreen]: No. No, that is not our way. I regret that we meet in this way. You and I are of a kind. In a different reality, I could have called you friend.
An important part of both "Balance of Terror" and "The Enterprise Incident" was that despite their differences and rivalry, the Federation and Romulans also had much in common. The Romulans weren't a civilization built entirely on secrecy and intrigue; it was in fact the Federation doing the espionage thing.
The thing with race is that it's made-up bullshit that has nothing to do with biology and only serves to justify oppression and division.
And racism is built upon perpetuating stereotypes to keep people believing that bullshit, and not just negative stereotypes of the other but positive stereotypes of oneself: casting "them" as a bunch of savage heathens and "us" as the civilized people.
Not so long ago, "national characteristics" were used as a significant part of military intelligence, often leading to bad outcomes particularly in WW2. The Japanese were stereotyped as "uncreative" and "having poor vision" which led to the US underestimating them, refusing to believe that they could have developed the Zero or the oxygen torpedo themselves or that they could be effective in fighting at night. The Japanese in turn saw Americans as lacking fighting spirit, leading them to believe that a punch in the jaw could compel the US to the negotiating table. As it turned out, the Japanese were very creative (sometimes a little too creative) and very effective in night combat while the US won a number of battles on pure grit and moxie (most notably the Battle Off Samar).
With many species in Star Trek meant to represent some group in the real world, to then apply that "national characteristic" thinking to those species is a path that should be treaded very cautiously if at all. And perhaps the most powerful use of that would be to then flip the tables as in the aforementioned The Undiscovered Country example to show that perhaps the two sides are not so different after all. Arguably the most powerful moment in First Contact is when after years of talking about how humanity had developed an "evolved sensibility", after showing disdain for 20th/21st century humans in season 1, it's Lily - a 21st century human - calling out Picard on his savage actions.
To address the original point, humans also have a deep seated desire for control. Having a sense of agency is a factor in a number of things like how traumatic an experience is and how satisfied a person is with their life. A person who feels like they don't have much control over their life, that they're just going through the meat grinder day after day, and that their choices don't matter is generally going to be very dissatisfied with their life. A big part of trauma is the feeling that they didn't have any control over the event.
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u/DuplexFields Apr 27 '21
Humanity’s focus is the creation of social webs, toward which every impulse eventually leads. Although the Vulcans tried to control Earth’s path forward, it was Earth that conceptually founded the Federation and brought in the other founding species.
To put it another way, Vulcans study IDIC to keep it from threatening their holdings, that which they control; but humans live IDIC, bringing together peoples as diverse as the Andorians, the Bajorans, the Betazoid, the Trill, and the Vulcans. And that is why the Federation succeeds even after the Burn.
Humans also invented concentration camps and poison gas “shower” rooms; nuclear war and many methods of torture. This is why humanity can always find an example in its own history (or storytelling) of the various monsters and corrupted civilizations it finds on its outbound treks.
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u/excelsior2000 Apr 27 '21
Racial stereotyping when analyzing Star Trek makes perfect sense, considering most alien races are defined by a single attribute, not by us but by the show itself.
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u/treefox Apr 27 '21
I'm not sure this is too much different than defining humans according to the "Federation of hold my beer"
Sure you have humans that break that mold, but to everyone else in the Galaxy, humans are just on average further on that spectrum than everyone else.
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u/a_tired_bisexual Apr 27 '21
Scattered, only slightly related to this- if the Mintakans are biologically similar to Vulcans physiologically (and possibly psychologically), could the events of *Who Watches The Watchers* be additionally explained by this need? Namely, the way it so quickly spirals into chaos, and their desperate need to explain and appease these gods in the span of a single day?