How cold is it to do mathematics?

I thought of a story

Somebody comes to a place where civilized people live. There is respect and concern and all this leads to an elaborate protocol (perhpas in a similar sense that the need of maximum generativity leads to the simple forms of Tangram). Being a base person the newcomer finds in these peope the operation of cold and unflinching rationality and uses her intellectual power to make the system bend towards her own base goal setting.

Are the people cold calculators, or is she just projecting whatever she carries in her heart?