On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 11:48 AM, Nicholas Leippe <[email protected]> wrote:
> Isn't there a catch-22 regarding self-diagnosis of sanity?
> If you think you're sane you're not, if you're not sure then you
> probably are... (but admit your doubt at your own peril!)
That is actually fairly close to the "official" catch-22 from the
novel. If you are mentally unfit for flight duty you can be grounded,
and all you have to do is ask. But there's a clause that says that
fear of immediate and real danger is the work of a rational mind. So
as soon as you ask to be grounded, you are acting out of concern for
your safety, and are therefore officially sane, and so you cannot be
grounded. The really crazy thing is that this particular clause
wasn't actually written down anywhere, but the military bureaucracy
made sure everyone believed it was, so it might as well have been.
--Levi
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