… “You mean there’s a catch?”
“Sure there’s a catch,” Doc Daneeka replied. “Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.”
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them, he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to, he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. - from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.
One of my favorite lines in writings on Logic … In the chapter mentioned below from Goldstein, "the ‘airman’s dilemma’ (as in Catch-22) is logically not even a condition that is true under no circumstances; it is a ‘vacuous biconditional’ that is ultimately meaningless.
… see the entire chapter of Laurence Goldstein titled “The Barber, Russell’s Paradox, Catch-22, God, contradiction and more: A defence of a Wittgensteinian conception of contradiction” … in Priest, Graham, et al. (eds.), The Law of Non-contradiction: New philosophical essays, Oxford University Press, 2004.
… another fun little book … Margot A. Henriksen’s Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age, University of California Press, 1997.