Rational Actors Only
Catch-22 and the madness of economic reason
Huple was a good pilot, but he was just a kid, so Dobbs, who was a worse pilot, snatched the controls. Dobb knew he wasn’t fit to fly a plane, and he even told his superiors so. If only they had listened. Soon after Dobbs took over and dropped their bombs over Avignon, the plane flipped and dove. “Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!” Yossarian cried out, as the plane dove deeper. There was a bump and a loud clunk when the plane reached the ground. But “there was no blood,” as Joseph Heller writes in his 1961 satire, Catch-22.
This scene of a plane crash begins one of Heller’s chapters on Major Milo Minderbinder, the entrepreneurial mayor of Malta, who is introduced soon after Dobbs, Huple, and Yossarian climb out of the wreckage and mysteriously find their way back to their military base. As soon as they do, Dobbs reveals his plot to kill Colonel Cathcart, who had just raised the number of missions bombardiers must fly, from fifty-five to sixty. “I’ve got it all worked out,” Dobbs tells Yossarian.
Each bombardier in Heller’s novel is required to fly a set number of missions before they can go home, but Colonel Cathcart kept raising the number. Yossarian, who was all too familiar with the colonel’s menacing tendency, was always trying to get out of the whole mess. He would plead with Doc Daneeka, the camp doctor, to ground him, explaining that he was insane. Anyone who was insane didn’t have to continue flying missions.
But for Doc Daneeka, who was the expert at identifying insanity, the act of requesting to be grounded served as evidence that Yossarian was in fact sane. Doc Daneeka had left a profitable medical practice back in the states to serve in the war, and he often wondered why everyone else complained so much. “You think you’ve got it bad,” he continually asks, “what about me?”1
What Heller implies in this logical conundrum was that only someone like Doc Daneeka could identify the difference between sanity and insanity. While one would assume the generals in the novel have the most authority, Heller creates subtle and implicit questions about who has the authority in the novel and where the power is. The generals? Was it Colonel Cathcart, who kept raising the number of missions to impress the generals? Or was it Doc Daneeka, who had the power to define sanity itself?
To a surprising degree, this seemingly inescapable logic that saturates Heller’s satire reflects the underlying power dynamics of the modern economy. Power, in the modern world, is less about who commands the most resources and more about who controls the categories that shape our lives. Who shapes the meaning of creditworthy, work experience, unemployment, investment grade, functional, disabled, or productive?
It’s not a cabal of elites pulling the strings; it’s a fragmented network of seemingly sound minds carrying out a range of faceless rules and practices that have become so routine that few pause to question it. And the common response to those curious enough to raise an eyebrow and wonder about the legitimacy of the edifice is both timeless and effective: that’s just how the world works. Those who persist in their effort to expose any degree of absurdity in the system may eventually find themselves outside the category of rational actor—and therefore unqualified to have a voice.
Doc Daneeka is surrounded by death and illness, but in nearly every conversation he has the in the novel, he asks: “what about me?” Heller’s character, Doc Dankeeka, could be seen as a critique of people in positions of power who victimize themselves.