The longer you watch Star Trek, the likelier you are to see Vulcans dunking on humanity. Across The Original Series and especially in Enterprise, these aliens love to present themselves as superior to less “enlightened” races. In reality, the Vulcans are complete hypocrites, and the more you learn about their pre-logic past, the more you’ll understand how bad their hypocrisy really is.

Vulcan Logic Is Illogical

This isn’t Starfleet Academy, but we’ve still got a Star Trek pop quiz question. What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about Vulcans? In most cases, it’s their strict adherence to the principles of logic, something that has become a cultural cornerstone of their entire society.

That belief in pure logic is the main reason that these Star Trek aliens tend to look down their noses at other races. Vulcans see races like humanity making one emotional decision after another and see that as a sign of weakness. However, if more of the races that the Vulcans sneer down at knew about the early history of the planet, they’d never take any more guff from these green-blooded bullies.

The Teachings Of Surak

Before these Star Trek fan-fave aliens learned how to embrace pure logic, they were an angry and warlike species who were just as bad (if not worse) than humanity. The Vulcans only accepted logic after the famous Surak began preaching it, and his teachings didn’t catch on right away. In fact, during the so-called “Time of Awakening,” things got worse than ever before.

Vulcan Weapons Of Mass Destruction

Star Trek has only given us so much information about this time period, but we know that this was a time when different factions of Vulcans were at war with one another. Fighting was brutal: factions had access to conventional weaponry such as atomic bombs and more exotic telepathic weapons like the Stone of Gol (seen in The Next Generation episode “Gambit, Part II”). Over time, Surak’s peaceful lessons about logic took root in Vulcan society, and the more aggressive factions left for the stars, eventually becoming the villainous Romulans.

The Romulans

After 1,500 years of cultural recovery after the death of Surak, the Vulcans became the Star Trek aliens everyone knows and loves. However, when they start acting superior to everybody else, nobody ever throws their own throwback history back in their faces. These guys came close to destroying their entire world just like Earth did, and unlike the Vulcans, humanity’s recovery process didn’t create any major threats to peace like the Romulans.

Once Again, Vulcan Weapons Of Mass Destruction

Making matters worse is that the Star Trek: The Next Generation two-parter “Gambit” makes it clear that Vulcan weapons from the Time of Awakening still pose a threat to people in the present day. That’s another area where humans are actually superior to Vulcans. Sure, humanity might have come close to destroying the planet, but at least the fallout from those early conflicts isn’t still threatening people hundreds of years later.

Vulcans Are Jerks

Not all of the ones we have seen in Star Trek have been ultra-snotty, but from Leonard Nimoy’s Spock onward, most Vulcans have looked down on humanity. At this point, we just wish the prickly Dr. McCoy knew more about early Vulcan history when he was clashing with Spock. He may be a doctor and not a bricklayer, but we’re confident he could have built a counterargument so strong even Spock’s Vulcan strength and unflappable eyebrows couldn’t knock it down.