I think they technically say that Vulcans don’t lie, not that Vulcans can’t lie. That would imply that they prefer to avoid it, but can if they need to. I mean, if Tuvok couldn’t lie then he never would have been able to go under cover as a member of the Maquis.
They’re largely autisticly coded, and we don’t generally lie, to the extent that it causes us problems. So I’d guess people are picking up on the coding.
Where you bend the truth, modify explanations, omit certain facts, exclude details, interpret data, make your own calculations or highlight known unknowns as well as unknown ones. Then you talk in great detail about everything without ever passing along any new information … it’s a highly developed skill.
But in everything you do … you never lie, you never tell an untruth … you just use logic and reason and stating certain truths while omitting others to make the other person believe what you want them to believe.
This is most evident in the TOS episode “The Galileo Seven”. It’s a horrible scenario: Spock is in command of a marooned crew on a hostile planet. He fails to take both a scared crew and an aggressive native species of spear throwing giants, into consideration. He makes one logical survival choice after another, failing to address everyone’s irrationality at every turn, which ultimately costs two lives. Nothing more than the crew’s faith in the chain of command (and perhaps faith in Scotty’s engineering skills) holds this disasterpiece together.
And Vulcans in Trek kind of just get worse from there. You’d think they’d eventually learn to take “irrational actors” into account with assessing situations, but they don’t. While that seems far-fetched, our economists here in 21st century Earth don’t either.
Agreed. I’m guessing this is one of those ‘myths’ that Humanity has about Vulcans and the Vulcans just play completely into it to have an advantage. But the longer a human works with a Vulcan, the sooner they realize that it’s utter bullshit and that most Vulcans are a bunch of lying emotional sluts
His marriage is fine. It’s his own trauma that he’s running from. That’s why he spends his days fixing everything else and his nights playing dress-up and dolls.
I mean they’re not even bound to tell the truth like the Aes Sedai, who anyway manage to deceive plenty. Plus even if Vulcans had some kind of instinct to only tell the truth, Spock is part human.
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