Random thought last night when I was thinking about the “issues” episodes in all of the various Star Trek serieses, and I happened to think that it was a bit unfortunate that Enterprise didn’t do well, because it wasn’t that much later (maybe 3-5 years) that the phenomenon of sociopaths and psychopaths really kicked off in popular culture, and wouldn’t that be an interesting “issue” episode, especially from a Vulcan perspective.
I was thinking about how Vulcans pride themselves on being logical and emotionless, and how that would interact with sociopathy being a known human disorder - Would they think sociopaths were stigmatized unfairly? Would they think sociopaths were cheating somehow?
Odd thought, and I couldn’t really decide what they would think.
(Obviously I’m not talking about the criminal/violence angle - most sociopaths aren’t Dexter - they’re very successful upper-management.)
They’re also not selfish, which is one of the defining traits of a sociopath. A sociopath is never going to say, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.” Particularly not if he’s the “one.”
In The Savage Curtain, the original series addresses the question pretty directly, but without the labels.
Surak is the Vulcan who started the whole cultural shift, and an incarnation of him sacrifices himself for the group. The bad guys are archetypal sociopaths - mustache-twirlers. Colonel Green was the Hitler of the Eugenics Wars, there’s some Klingon asshole (original series, after all), there’s some woman who did Mengele-like experiments, and Genghis Khan.
That “Klingon asshole” was Kah’Less (or however it’s spelled). The one that Worf seemed to get a boner over all the time the way Spock would over Surak if vulcans got boners at times other than ponfar.
Frankly, it annoyed me that Genghis was portrayed as little more than a mute thug, but the key aspect is not that these were accurate depictions of the historical characters, but pastiches based on Kirk’s and Spock’s (and possibly other crew members’) impressions of these characters.
Similarly, the cloned Kahless that eventually appeared on TNG is at best a heavily mythologized version of the original.
In The Enemy Within, a transporter malfunction does a Jekyll/Hyde split on Kirk. Evil Kirk is a sociopath who goes after whatever he wants and screw the rules and others’ rights – but Good Kirk is an indecisive, ineffectual, cowardly weakling. It’s implied he couldn’t function as we know him without both sides. Definitely a moral, for a certain value of morals.
I have - “sociopath” is one of those words that keeps getting redefined a lot. In the book Descarte’s Error for example it’s used to refer to people who essentially have no emotions.