Feb. 28, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:57
2921 The Truth About Spock | RIP Leonard Nimoy
Leonard Nimoy was an actor, film director, poet, singer and photographer - famous for his role as Mr. Spock in the original Star Trek series and multiple sequels. We examine the cultural impact of the Spock character, what Vulcans represented, how you can “live long and prosper” and if the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner (Captain James T. Kirk), DeForest Kelley (Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy), George Takei (Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu) and the rest of the Starship Enterprise crew made an unforgettable impact on American culture. Rest in Peace Leonard Nimoy. Live Long and Prosper!
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
This is a tribute to the recently departed Lennon Nimoy and his character Spock, commonly known as Mr.
Spock, of course, who was a Vulcan.
With pointed ears, a character in the Star Trek media franchise.
A hyper-rational, non-magical kind of elf, I suppose.
For those who don't know, Vulcans are an integral part of other Star Trek crews.
Female science officer Commander T'Pol aboard the starship Enterprise NX-01 and Lieutenant Commander Tuvok served as tactical and security officer on the USS Voyager.
So in the various Star Trek television series, the first one came out in the 60s and it ran only for a couple of seasons.
And movies Vulcans are noted for their strenuous attempts to live by reason and logic with no interference from emotion.
Kind of like a Buddhist approach that emotions can be distracting and really pure rational logic is the way to go.
And in the Star Trek universe, the Vulcans are the first...
Aliens that humanity makes contact with, they become sort of like humanity's big brother in a kind of way.
And psychologically, that kind of works.
Like younger siblings, before emotional regulation kicks in, often look at the equanimity of older siblings with some envy and feel over-emotional, dare I say, Kirk-like in comparison to elder siblings.
And so they advise Earth officials on how to proceed into the galaxy.
The Vulcan High Command considered humans pretty volatile and attempted in a parental way to slow down humanity's move into the galaxy until the time was right.
Again, that's kind of an older sibling thing to do.
Beware of the dangers that are out there, the Klingons and the Romulans and so on.
And the fact that Vulcans are kind of like...
Parent or elder sibling role figures for humanity is exposed also by their prodigious mental powers.
Of course, your parents always seem godlike in terms of their intellects when you're a kid.
Greater average body height, physical superiority, and lifespans of 200 years.
Now, the role and impact of Star Trek is very deep and very powerful, should not be underestimated.
Way back in the day, gosh, this is long before I ever did this show, I was on a television panel Talking about Star Trek with people who called in, and there are lots of people calling in who saying, well, why do you care?
Why do you care?
Well, we care because it's important, because other people care, because it matters.
I didn't grow up in the 60s, but I did watch Star Trek in the 70s.
I was born in 66, so a little late for some of that stuff.
But during the Cold War, the idea or the vision that there was a successful humanity in the future that had crossed the nuclear threshold without blowing the planet into smithereens and had achieved a relatively peaceful and secure and stable society was quite encouraging and not common.
There was a lot of dystopian stuff going on, a lot of pretty irrational things.
So it is, you know, Spock's character, the Vulcans in general, one of the most impactful figures and, I think, pretty much underestimated influences in modern philosophy.
And if you consider the reach of Star Trek, how far it goes and its role as a forum for debates on Western and particularly American cultures and values, it's astonishing.
I mean, the show spawned a whole franchise.
Five additional television series, 12 films, countless books, games, toys, and is now considered one, if not the most popular science fiction television shows of all times.
It's really Star Trek in a way versus Star Wars in terms of multi-billion dollar revenue and expansions that span over several decades.
Now, Star Trek was a philosophical show and...
It really had a lot of impact and had people think what is the relation between reason and emotion.
To explore the prime directive of Starfleet was to not interfere with the cultures that you come across.
To explore the galaxy without interfering with the local cultures was fascinating and we all thought what would we do in other cultures.
There were amazing shows For instance, there was a show where two planets are involved in a war, and rather than actually have a violent war, they just disintegrate people in a chamber.
And Kirk's speech that the war has become so tame that you don't even want to stop it.
It's very, very powerful.
And of course, the nuclear metaphor there was...
Very powerful.
And just so many different shows.
There was a show where they went to a galaxy and found ancient Greek gods who had visited Earth.
And the idea, of course, that we get sort of a sense of deity from space aliens was mind-blowing at the time and incredibly clever.
Of course, there's this idea that says, well, the halo is the light coming off the helmet of the space alien, things like that.
It was really, really powerful.
And it was one of the few shows you could turn into and really see, you know, vivid characters, very expertly played, and a real exploration of ideas.
And one of the few places where you could actually get some philosophical exploration.
And people are incredibly thirsty.
For philosophy, this, like, Free Domain Radio, this show that I host, been downloaded over 100 million times, at a minimum, probably closer to 150, if you can't, mirror sites and BitTorrents and so on.
People are very hungry for something of substance.
You know, we get through our lives in the everyday, like, flicking through a book, you know, if you draw those little...
I don't know if people even do this anymore.
When I was a kid, you get a book, you draw little animations, you flip through them.
People's days, you know, they flip through and people want to zoom out, bigger picture, where do I stand in the story of the species?
And Star Trek really gave you something like that.
And optimistic it was.
And also, the fact that in Star Trek, the weapons never seemed to work, you know?
Phases on full ineffectiveness.
Well, that's what they're only setting this, Captain.
Can't really do much about that.
They're always like, let's fight them.
Okay, let's not, because they've got some super weapons.
So they were always losing and therefore had to use their wits, which I thought was interesting.
So, Star Trek was watched and absorbed by people who went into politics, philosophy, literature, academia, engineering, of course.
A lot of scientists viewed Spock as particularly compelling.
And that...
Star Wars is more...
Science fantasy.
I mean, the force and choke powers and swords and stuff like that.
It's more like a medieval story set in space.
Whereas Star Trek, which is fun, there's nothing wrong with it, but Star Trek I think appealed to older people and people who could carry some of those lessons forward into their adulthood.
Now, originally, of course, William Shatner thought that he was the star.
He was captain and he was the star.
But Leonard Nimoy's incredibly effective deadpan, raised eyebrow portrayal of Mr.
Spock made him as popular with the audience as Captain Kirk.
Created a rather significant rivalry.
So Bill Shatner thought, I'm the star, baby!
And fan mail piled up, of course, in...
In Leonard Nimoy's dressing room, the majority, of course, from women who, in an early and rather space opera kind of Fifty Shades of Raised Eyebrow, wanted to melt the Vulcan man's stony heart.
Leonard Nimoy became convinced that he was the show's de facto star and deserved the salary to prove it, and there was a lot of animosity between Nimoy and Shatner.
Nimoy accused William Shatner of repeatedly stealing not only his lines but also the bicycle!
That he used to get around the studio back lot.
Nimoy said a major area of conflict was Bill's concern that Spock was getting ahead of Kirk in terms of problem solving.
Bill was worried that Kirk would seem unintelligent by contrast.
And so lines of dialogue that had logically been Spock's soon became Kirk's.
One thing that I read was that these actors really fought hard for their characters and really fought hard to keep the quality of the show, which obviously did dip.
In the third season, keep the quality of the show alive.
And, of course, there were a lot of compromises that had to be made in the 60s with regards to sexuality and interracial romance and so on.
It was kind of a boxy time.
You're not going to get the stuff that goes on in House of Cards going on in mainstream TV in the 60s.
Now, the character of Mr.
Spock was a huge inspiration for a lot of budding scientists and engineers.
Leonard Nimoy has said that if they meet him, they always want to show him their work and discuss it with him as if he were a scientific peer, as opposed to what he was, an actor, a pilot, a photographer, a poet, and a person who tragically murdered a lot of plastic in pretty terrible final albums.
And his stock response in these situations when people would say, Hey, Nimoy, check out my work.
He's like, Well, it certainly looks like you're headed in the right direction.
And Spock's philosophical outlook on life has probably quite influenced Biting Scientists the world over.
And so let's have a look.
It's important.
This is where a lot of people get their exposure to philosophy.
They get it through religion to some degree.
They also get it through the media.
They don't really get it so much in school because any fundamental values discussed in school tend to upset or alienate some parents.
So that's why school tends to be so relentlessly trivial and boring.
But This was one of the earliest philosophical impacts of some of the smartest people on our planet imbibed, so let's have a look at what he stood for.
Now, first of all, I've got this from a couple of sources, and we'll put notes in below, but I think it's worth mentioning that Gene Roddenberry, while not an objectivist, was an admirer of Ayn Rand, and apparently he named Yeoman Janis Rand, who was originally supposed to be a major character after her.
He consulted Ayn Rand's book on the philosophy of art, called The Romantic Manifesto, a lot when creating Star Trek.
He read a lot of Ayn Rand's, including Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, which apparently he read four or five times, and The Romantic Manifesto.
And two of Roddenberry's protégés, Myrna Culbreth and Sandra Marshak, became authors and were unabashed or are unabashed objectivists.
And Roddenberry was a self-described humanist and, like Rand, was a An atheist.
And that was also quite powerful and quite surprising at the time.
The lack of religion in Star Trek was quite fascinating because there was a lot of left-wing ideas that came over from the intellectuals who were fleeing the destruction of Europe in the Nazi period and, of course, in the Second World War.
And with the GI Bill there was a lot of jobs for academics and so a lot of them came over from Europe and brought a lot of left-wing ideology with them because in a lot of ways in Germany in the 1930s was a battle between the Communists and the National Socialists, the Nazis.
National Socialists of course won, a lot of the Communists fled and some left-wing people fled as well fearing repercussions and rightly so from Hitler's goons and they fled to the West and they brought a lot of left-wing ideology.
Left-wing ideology is Big government is great, which is why you have a federation.
There's never really any trade.
There's some caricatures of capitalism in the kind of anti-Semitic Ferengi that show up in the next generation.
But there was atheism and there was government everywhere.
Basically, it's a government ship, a military ship, paramilitary ship.
So I think recognizing that it was the right zeitgeist at the time for a lot of people who were skeptical of religion, and of course the 60s was the age of the government can solve and fix everything, right?
I mean, government can solve poverty, government can get rid of drugs, government can solve race conflicts.
There was this massive optimism about what government can do, and you really see that reflected.
An interviewer also found out that Ayn Rand herself watched Star Trek and Spock was her favorite character.
So where did Spock come from in the story?
He was born on the planet Vulcan to a human mother, a schoolteacher, and a Vulcan father, a scientist and diplomat.
Spock's mixed parentage caused a lot of problems in his early life.
His own father, despite having married a human woman, was somewhat ambivalent about his son's half-human nature at his birth.
Half-breed!
The mother watched Spock's stiff-lipped anguish caused by torment at the hands of other Vulcan children who repeatedly attacked and teased him to provoke emotional responses, knowing that his human half was suffering.
Now, there are...
I shouldn't say there are some theories.
It's one of my sort of pet theories that...
The brain is sort of like the higher intellect, the neofrontal cortex, the seat of reasoning.
To some degree, I get the feeling.
Like, I'm not proving it.
It's not...
It's not even syllogistical.
It's certainly not empirical.
But I have the feeling that if you are challenged or rejected by your peers, imagination and higher reasoning can somehow be the scar tissue that arises from these social pummels from peers.
So the fact that Mark had a backstory, his emotionlessness and his commitment to rationality and his hyperintelligence, if you're a very intelligent kid stuck in some backwater government school, it can be kind of rough.
There's a lot of...
Don't be smart, you know, keener, geek, teacher's pet and all that kind of stuff.
So the fact that he had this backstory I think is important.
The relationship between reason and emotion has always been a great challenge.
It's gone as far as the complete mind-body dichotomy, where, you know, the mind is perfect and the body is and its emotions are filthy, all the way to rank hedonism, which is, you know, follow every lustful and earthly impulse of your Nervous system and, you know, step like a jackbooted emotional thug on your high reasoning centers.
I think, obviously, we are a blend and a mix is best.
So following Vulcan traditional culture, seven-year-old Smok got engaged to a girl with the understanding that they will fulfill this commitment once they become adults.
And then, like a lot of people who may not want to marry a person that their parents have culturally impregnated for them, he ran away to join the army.
Also at the age of seven, Spock decided prematurely and without parental knowledge or approval to undertake the Vulcan maturity trial in the wilderness in an attempt to prove himself.
On the trial, his pet was fatally wounded and Spock himself almost got killed.
This traumatic event was a turning point which led him to follow the Vulcan philosophies of emotional suppression and logic.
When Spock chose to enroll in the Earth-based Starfleet Academy instead of the Vulcan Science Academy...
He got into an argument with his father, and the two did not speak with each other for the next 18 years.
That's a parental alienation that is really quite powerful.
And again, it's one of these arguments that there are certain familial and cultural structures wherein significant emotionality leads to disasters, particularly when there's a lot of authoritarianism, because the rebelliousness and the frustration and the anger that you feel at being very tightly controlled can explode and erupt in destructive ways.
I mean, it's trying to help you, but because you're so confined, it's kind of destructive.
And this is another reason, probably, why the character rejected emotions as dangerous.
So, Spock had to endure this significant lack of parental empathy.
And his father's aggression, a high level of coercion and control...
So he, not shockingly, chose a career in the pretty hierarchical and partly military Starfleet, of course.
He found an environment where his freedoms and liberties were equally constrained as throughout his childhood.
You know, we get a lot of this sort of stuff happens in life where you see women with abusive dads and they, like, run away with the first guy...
To get away from their dad, the guy ends up being just like their dad.
There's a lot of this escape into the tyranny you came out of.
You know, without self-knowledge, all attempts to escape just trap you in a revolving door.
You don't really get out.
You've got to escape your illusions, and then you can escape your history.
If your history was based on illusions and tyranny, if you learn the truth, it sets you free.
Cliché, but very true.
And during the original series, Spock displays almost constantly a cool aloofness.
This is a trait associated with almost all Vulcans.
And Leonard Nimoy playing the character would actually say that Lucky would be in character for like, you know, TV takes forever, movies take forever.
I once saw, I had a movie that I wrote and produced, which was in the Hollywood Film Festival.
You can actually find it at youtube.com slash freedomainradio under the title After.
After.
And Norman Jewison, a famous director, gave a speech, and he said, here's what making a movie is.
You wait for years for the right script to come along, and then you wait for another year or two for all the actors you want to be available, and then you spend months scouting locations, and then this, and then this, and then this, and you finally get everything set up.
And your director of photography says, okay, we've got one take because we're losing the light.
It's just a squished moment after so much preparation.
And so Leonard Nimoy would be in character in Spock all day and then at the end of the day just burst into tears and sob uncontrollably because repressing that amount of emotion for the character.
You can't fake it, particularly in a little bit in the stage you can do it.
You know, like in Long Day's Journey into Night, the father of the character is...
Well, he's based upon a guy who could, one day after his son died, he went and gave this performance.
On stage, you can kind of get away with it a little bit, but when the camera's right here, you can't.
So he had to actually kind of be dead inside to play the character, and then he would sob uncontrollably after a day's shooting.
Now, Vulcans in the story are exactly and totally capable of experiencing extremely powerful emotions, paranoia, homicidal rage, and thus they have adopted a universal code of emotional control.
And one of the reasons for that is in this backstory to Vulcan is 1600 years before the opening of Star Trek, Vulcan suffered a series of devastating wars which nearly destroyed the planet.
And then the Vulcan philosopher Surak developed a philosophy of peace through emotional control.
And this feeling That emotions are volatile, unchained, vampiric hellhounds of near-universal destruction is quite common throughout a lot of philosophies.
And it has a lot to do with controlling a slave population, because slaves don't like being slaves.
If they're in touch with their emotions, they tend to rebel.
So there's a lot of disconnect from your feelings for the convenience of the ruling classes, and this is why these shows are always quite hierarchical.
The suppressing of emotions in the Vulcan philosophy is displayed as a healthy and necessary means to achieve a productive life.
To some viewers, it might even think or they might conclude that high-level intelligence requires somehow the suppression.
Of emotions.
That's a real challenge.
You know, there's a lot of inspiration in science.
A guy who came up with the structure of the carbon atom just had a dream about it.
There's a lot of preparation, a lot of work.
You've got to discipline yourself.
There's a weight for, you know, as Paul McCartney woke up with the tune for Yesterday floating around in his head.
And I think he didn't even have the right lyrics to begin with.
And...
It went scrambled eggs.
Oh, my dear, you have got lovely legs.
And then he finally wrote it down after asking people for weeks.
Hey, have you heard this song before?
I'm pretty sure I've heard it before.
Nobody had.
But that's after they put in their Malcolm Gladwell-approved 10,000 hours of practice.
So you do a lot of work, but then there is a huge amount of inspiration that happens.
And if you disconnect your emotional centers, you lose out on that inspiration.
Very specifically measured psychological tasks...
It's been shown that the unconscious mind, subconscious mind, can be up to 6,000 times faster than the conscious mind.
They both have.
They're amazing.
I mean, to me, the conscious mind is a laser and the subconscious mind is moonlight.
You don't want to navigate a dark forest by a laser, but you also don't want to try and cut stone with moonlight, so they both have their place.
Many real-world cultures, including South Asian cultures, We believe that emotional suppression is a very masculine quality and that emotional expression qualifies you as weak.
So the idea of womanly cries, the man, emotional constipation, my mouth is a tight anus, like how it generally works for a lot of people.
And of course, in the 60s, you began to really see disintegration of two-parent families and you began to see single moms showing up as significant cultural forces really the first time.
Ever.
And so, seeing a hyper-masculine character for a lot of kids through divorce, don't get to see much of their dads, probably had something to do with the success of the show as well.
Now, just to mention, this is sort of the real-world implications of suppressing emotions.
And there are There are some theories that say that all mental discomfort, like all long-term mental discomfort, all psychological dysfunction, results from the avoidance of legitimate suffering, historical suffering in particular.
But it's not good.
It's not good to suppress emotions.
A lot of people with borderline personality disorder report they spend a lot of time and energy tamping down the chompy beasts of dangerous emotions.
Effects of consistent emotional suppression include increased physical stress on your body, high blood pressure, increased incidence of diabetes, heart disease and you can experience high anxiety.
And depression.
Emotions are there to help guide you in your life.
They're the early warning systems.
If you feel angry when you're being exploited, you feel affection when you are being loved, and you feel fear when you're being threatened, they're all very early warning and helpful emotions to have.
But they can be inconvenient, of course, when we In relationships that are provoking negative emotions for us It's a lot easier and of course the person who's provoking these negative emotions wants us to suppress our own feelings again back to slave management This unhealthy practice of suppression often starts in early childhood with parents You want their child to obey and not whine and not cry and not squirm in the whatever you're taking them and so on and so If
you just push away these feelings, this is really a challenge.
They don't go away.
They often will tend to redouble their efforts.
So researchers have studied what happens when you try to push away thoughts and feelings for decades.
I mean, they've studied for decades.
They haven't studied everyone doing it for decades.
There's a famous study by Daniel Wegner, PhD, and his colleagues.
he examined what happened when one group of people was instructed to push away thoughts of a white bear.
I don't know, I guess there'd be climate change deniers.
He found that the group who had suppressed thoughts of a white bear actually ended up, of course, having more white bear thoughts.
Don't think of an elephant!
What did you just think of?
And if you're allowed to think about anything, you don't think about the white bear.
If you're forbidden to, you're gonna think about the white bear.
He called this the rebound effect of thought suppression.
So if you try and push away thoughts of some topic, you're going to end up with more thoughts of that topic.
Tons of follow-up studies have confirmed this finding.
And what does this mean?
Well, if you try and push away thoughts and feelings, you're going to make more trouble for yourself in the long run.
Sort of pay me now, pay me later kind of thing.
And of course what happens, it's a vicious cycle, right?
It's an addiction of rejection.
You experience a painful emotion, push it away.
Which leads to more painful emotions, self-alienation, which you try and push away.
You get the escalation.
And there are some theories which emotional suppression may be partly the reason behind people who have conditions such as bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and so on.
So this is why they struggle with so many painful thoughts and emotions.
Not proven, but there's some theories behind it.
So, you know, the opposite of emotional repression is not exploding, right?
The Aristotelian mean, right?
You don't want to be not having emotions and at the same time you don't want to be like lizard brain acting out, thump anybody who looks at you funny kind of way.
And this is why, in this show, I talk a lot about therapy, self-knowledge, and reach out to people, talk to people, connect with people, and that can help enormously with your feelings.
Because one of the great lessons of life is you're never as alone as you think you are.
You're only alone if you think you are, but if you connect with other people about what's going on for you, you'll find that we're all in the same big boat.
And of course, it's very tough in a relationship.
If you suppress your emotions, you are emotionally unavailable in a relationship.
And when we shut feelings off, people around us tend to get more and more tense because they're waiting for the mushroom cloud of self-expression, which is...
So, and you know, you know, your girlfriend slams the door and you're like, what's the matter?
Nothing.
It's like, ooh, okay, we're in for one of those rides, are we?
And emotions are so fast.
So fast.
It takes about 100 milliseconds for our brain to react emotionally, about 600 milliseconds for our thinking brain, our cortex to register this reaction.
So your thoughts are in your face before your brain, your feelings in particular are in your face before your brain even knows what's happening.
So by the time you've decided to suppress your emotions, they're already all over your face and body.
You're 500 milliseconds too late.
It's always catch up, duck and cover.
Now, of course, when we deny our feelings, our partners get kind of tense because our faces register our feelings way faster than the thinking part of our brain can shut them down.
So your cheeks get red and you think, what's wrong?
Oh, nothing's wrong.
I'm fine.
Fine.
Why do you ask?
It makes people a little tense, right?
Because they know you don't trust them because you're lying to them.
So, your partner also knows when you're shutting them out.
If they can't read our cues, they can't predict our behavior.
We say one thing, but they see another.
Of course, they're going to get tense, right?
So, yeah, share your feelings.
Give your partners and friends and family a chance to show that they care and all that kind of stuff.
So, don't spark it up.
So...
In the 1982 movie The Wrath of Count, Spock voluntarily sacrifices his life to save the lives of the crew, which could be considered a virtuous action.
Spock quickly perishes, and with his final breath says to Kirk, don't grieve, Admiral, it is logical.
The needs of the many outweigh, Kirk finishes for him, the needs of the few.
Spock replies, or the one.
Hey, this is base utilitarianism and we're supposed to live our lives like it's the collective for the good of everyone that is our motivating factor and so on.
Homos economis tells us otherwise, our self-interest and so on.
And the funny thing is, I don't like philosophies that go very much against the biological grain of why we are here to even develop philosophies in the first place.
Sorry.
Sorry.
We are biologically driven for close-kin conditions and affection to the DNA that is closest to us.
My kids, sadly, are more important to me than your kids.
I don't care about them, but that's how biology works.
And then we have this philosophy that says, put everyone else first.
The reality is, of course, there's no such thing as the common good.
There's no such thing as a collective.
It doesn't have a voice.
And so what happens is, individual leaders come up to you and say, sacrifice yourself for the good of society.
Because I'm speaking for society.
They voted for me, or God put me here, divine right of kings.
There's some way in which someone comes to you and says, sacrifice yourself on behalf of all of those people.
Can I talk to them directly?
No!
They're speaking through me.
Don't worry.
I will collect your sacrifice, go off to war, or, you know, obey me, or whatever it is, right?
So...
There's no proof for any of this.
For a very logical character, there's no proof for any of this.
And it's just an arbitrary assertion.
It's not any kind of philosophical principle.
It's just a self-sacrifice kind of a principle.
Because who knows what everyone needs?
Who knows what is best for everyone?
Nobody does.
I mean, I don't even know what's best for me sometimes.
Sit down to a plate full of pancakes on a Saturday morning?
I'm dozy!
I mean, we all make those kinds of mistakes, right?
So, utilitarianism, the greatest good for the greatest number, it's just a way to get you to obey whoever happens to be in command.
But they like to say, well, you're not obeying me, you're obeying the Collective good your whatever right and so that's not really great You know because at least in it in religion right people will say a lot of the priests or a lot of religious leaders will say Don't obey me obey God,
but God speaks only through me But of course for most of the Christian religion in particular you have a personal relationship with the deity and God and Jesus can tell you what to do without a third party Hooking themselves up to your moral jugular so We can't always know what's great for us.
Like 95% of people who diet end up at the same weight or more within a year or two.
So even people who want to diet don't even or can't achieve what's good for them.
So the idea that we can act in a way that's beneficial to everyone else.
I mean, yes, let's not go around raping, killing, murdering, and so on.
But as far as self-sacrifice for the sake of the common good, it's completely undefined.
Common good according to who?
According to what standard?
What level of sacrifice is acceptable?
And of course, you know, it's funny how, I mean, presidents always talk about this.
Leaders always talk about this.
Self-sacrifice.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.
But if anyone shoots at me, I want 1,900 guys to throw themselves in front of my body.
It's like, well, that's not really...
That's the good of the one outmeaning the good of the many.
So it's all nonsense.
So...
So I think it has really been a very powerful imprint on our way of thinking.
And there is a lot that is admirable about the character.
You know, one of the things I loved about Star Trek was that, you know, growing up in England in the 70s and Canada in the 80s, In public schools and so on.
I mean, it was just a giant Lord of the Flies cesspit of betrayal, violence, bullying and gross-outs.
And seeing a noble character.
And Spock has a very powerful depth of nobility and gravitas.
Seeing these people who really stick up for each other, who really, they don't betray each other, and they are always there for each other, and they have meaningful and deep conversations about things which really matter, and they're engaged in a big mission, it took us out of the pettiness of a lot of our lives, out of the boring homework and the dull make a pioneer house out of popsicle sticks because we can't teach you anything important.
So, I think that there was a lot of really powerful stuff about the show and its characters.
And it really did give people dualistic temptations to be all id or all superego, right?
All animal passions or all emotional restraint.
Of course, the blend is very, very important.
And you don't want to actually live like a Vulcan.
I mean, if there was a group of human beings who lived completely by Vulcans, they're probably...
You know, heartless stoic loners or psychopaths or whatever, no empathy for the feelings of others.
Also the commitment to the life of the intellect, life of science, combined with the, I guess you'd call it the Big Town Vulcans going their own way, anti-sexuality, as opposed to Kirk, who would bang anything with four tentacles and half a heartbeat.
And so there is also that temptation that we can escape from the challenges of sexuality and romance and wooing and rejection by escaping into the life of the mind.
And that, of course, was quite powerful and a great temptation, of course.
We all want to focus on the muscles that we're already strong at and we all want to neglect the muscles that make us feel weak.
And so people who are very smart, very high IQ are often punished and their emotions Become sort of their enemies through social ostracism and attack and put-downs.
So the idea that emotions are bad, intellect is good, plays to their strengths, but doesn't leave them very well-rounded.
Sort of reminds me of one guy I knew who just, all he ever did was work on his biceps.
His ridiculously giant basketball biceps, and then the rest of his hands were sort of like a little less Popeye, a little more olive oil.
I don't know if that analogy means anything to you, but...
I mean, it's fine to care for the needs of the many.
I mean, I want the world to be a better place.
I try and put out reason and evidence and good, hopefully, semi-entertaining arguments to make that case.
But fundamentally it's up to you to figure out what long life and prosperity, to live long and prosper, what that is going to mean in your life.
The false dichotomy of reason versus emotion.
Emotions can be far more rational because emotions tend to be less defensive and more primally accurate about our social situations.
We can talk ourselves intellectually in and out of everything, but our dreams and our passions will often set us straight if we listen.
I think that's a very important lesson.
We cannot escape our animal nature.
That is to try and be the body as the hand, the wet hand in the shower, and the mind to be the soap that you squeeze that jets out.
Well, this is back to religion, where the soul, and the soul is antithetical to the body, and the soul is pure, and the body is Satan's.
I mean, this is all not very positive and healthy stuff, I think.
Philosophy.
True philosophy is not threatened by emotions, but accepts and absorbs the powerful emotions.
The role that emotions play in wisdom, right?
And empathy and the sharing emotions allow us to behave virtuously.
If you have real empathy, ethics becomes more instinctual, which is kind of where we want it to be.
We don't want people to have to consult, you know, page 384 of...
Some book by, I mean, Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant, where, ah, in order to, should I strangle this hobo or not?
I mean, you don't want that.
You want it to be more instinctual.
So your emotions and the sharing of and connecting of your emotions with others helps you realize that other people, in many ways, everyone, but a lot of people, kind of like you.
And you can't hurt people that your heart is open to because you register their pain as your own pain.
You've got these mirror neurons in the brain that register pain for you when you hurt someone else.
If you have all of that stuff, you don't need a lot of ethics except for the most abstract questions, you know, like foreign policy, war, taxation, and so on, government policies.
But in your own personal life, it is empathy that will give you, I believe, the greatest ethics, interpersonal ethics.
And, of course, the vast power of the subconscious mind, which, you know, predates us significantly.
You can't, the brain can't live without the liver, and the liver is a lot older than the brain is.
So we rest like a little gem on top of a pyramid on the vast accumulation of biological adaptations and development that have occurred for many billions of years.
And you don't want to just deny all the wisdom of the body in the pursuit of mere abstractions.
Abstractions are our differentiating strength and power.
It's a unique thing that human brain can do, and it is awesome beyond words.
But without the accumulated wisdom and instincts of the body, I believe it ends up being quite futile and quite sterile.
In many ways.
And we do want to find ways to build peace in the world through sharing our thoughts and feelings, listening, caring, and not necessarily through the suppression of emotion, which I think the fact that Vulcans suppress so much emotion and then are given to homicidal paranoias and rage does to me, I think, have something to do with it.
If you lock a slave or a pet in a dungeon long enough, when he gets out, he's going to be pissed.
And that is a very dangerous situation for humanity to be in.
So I hope that you've enjoyed the chat.
I look forward to your comments below.
R.I.P. That's the one, right?
Yeah, R.I.P. to Leonard Nimoy, who was a fantastic actor, a very talented human being, a very smart human being, and who really fought very hard to create and maintain one of the most compelling characters in all of modern art.
