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Notes -
Catch-22 IRL
CW: suicide, spoilers for Seven
Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is justly revered as one of the best novels ever written about war, and one of the best novels of any kind from the twentieth century. The title refers to various paradoxical or mutually contradictory rules one encounters in the armed forces, the most famous of which concerns how a fighter pilot may take medical leave owing to psychic distress. If a pilot is crazy, he should not be flying any more missions and ought to be grounded. However, if the pilot, recognising his own mental illness, thereby requests to be grounded – the mere act of his requesting indicates a concern for his own welfare which is entirely rational. Conversely, a pilot would have to be crazy to volunteer for 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."
Over at Unherd (archive link), Kathleen Stock presents an interesting real-life parallel of a case currently going through the court system in the UK (emphasis mine):
Stock notes the parallels with Catch-22, though in this case the logical dilemma is almost the reverse of Heller's. In Catch-22, possessing the accurate insight that you are mentally ill (and acting upon it) is taken as evidence of your sanity. In PPT's case, however, the fact that he is predicting that X will cause him to take his own life is taken as evidence of his mental illness, which means that his prediction must be discounted as coming from someone lacking in mental acuity. The situation is reminiscent of what Eric S. Raymond calls "Kafkatrapping", wherein a person's denial that they are racist/sexist/homophobic etc. is taken as evidence of their guilt. As Raymond noted, this argument logically implies that everyone in the entire world is guilty of the sins in question, as it divides the world into a) those who freely admit to being racist or sexist, and b) those who, in denying this, implicate themselves.
This leads to an interesting philosophical conundrum. If a person predicts that, should circumstance X come to pass, they will take their own life – should we ever take that at face value, or should it always call their mental acuity into question? By the reasonable person standard, are there any circumstances such that, if they befell someone, we would reasonably expect a person otherwise untroubled by mental illness to take his own life? I'm not suicidal, I have no reason to believe I'm crazy, and yet I don't find it the least bit difficult to imagine hypothetical circumstances under which taking my own life would seem like a very compelling choice indeed.* But if I were to announce "if such-and-such happened, I would strongly consider killing myself", would the mere act of announcing this indicate that I was not of sound mind?
Granted, I don't think that's what happened here – I don't think the judge decided the defendant was depressed solely on the basis of his threat to kill himself. As mentioned above, PPT's defense team went to great lengths to demonstrate their client's neurodivergent credentials (bipolar, traumatic experiences), with the obvious goal of establishing that his threat to take his own life was not an idle one. But it seems to have backfired: the judge decided "you're obviously profoundly depressed and mentally ill, such that not even your threat to kill yourself can be taken at face value". Again, a very Heller-esque situation: PPT's threat to take his own life was taken less seriously because he claimed to have a history of mental illness (which implies the judge would have taken it more seriously otherwise)! Thinking about this is making me go cross-eyed.
Or perhaps the judge really does believe that PPT will attempt to take his own life if his conditions aren't met, but he simply has a policy of never negotiating with terrorists, including emotional terrorists. It would set a very dangerous legal precedent indeed, if defendants in sex crimes were allowed to dictate the terms of the proceedings against them on pain of suicide.
While we can of course recognise the existence of mentally ill people with diminished capacity, the minute the legal system explicitly and formally acknowledged this, it quickly created some very perverse incentives. I'm reminded (again) of the 1995 thriller Seven. After murdering five victims, the serial killer John Doe unexpectedly turns himself in at the end of the second act. His defense attorney presents the police with a very atypical plea bargain: Doe claims to know where two additional corpses are buried, and if the detectives in charge of his case (Mills and Somerset) agree to escort him to this location alone, he will immediately sign a full confession and plead guilty to all of the murders. But if the two detectives decline, Doe will instead plead not guilty by reason of insanity (the defense attorney notes that the extremely gruesome killings would make such a plea a cakewalk). Somerset points out that, if Doe was to plead insanity, the conversation they are currently having would be admissible as evidence: the fact that Doe is capable of forethought and blackmail strongly suggests his higher reasoning capabilities are very much intact. I'm curious if anything like this (in which a defendant threatens to plead insanity unless such-and-such) has any precedent in legal history.
The headline of Stock's column is "Stop weaponising suicide". While I agree with this sentiment,** I don't think PPT's case is actually an example of suicide being weaponised. Rather, the threat of suicide is being weaponised: it's just ordinary old-fashioned emotional blackmail. I've long thought that threatening to kill yourself if your demands aren't met is one of the cheapest, most contemptible bargaining tactics ever invented (especially given what a high proportion of these threats turn out to be empty), and that anyone who employs it no longer deserves any place in civil society.*** Perhaps one of the most disheartening trends in modern society is how certain political activists have realised they can employ this bargaining tactic in political contexts, not just interpersonal ones, in order to get their way. I don't want to delve into this too much as it's well-trodden territory, and this post is too long as it stands. Suffice it to say that, as much as the term "genocide" has been abused over the past few decades, the concept of a self-administered "genocide" (geno-suicide? sui-genocide?) makes an outright mockery of the concept.
If an adult threatened to kill themselves if you didn't do what they wanted you to, I think the only reasonable response is to stand firm. As much as it might pain you, if you give in to their demands, you're sending the message that they can threaten to kill themselves whenever they want you to do something for them – there is absolutely no way this will be the last time they use this dirty trick. It follows that when a political faction employs it – once again, the only appropriate response is to stand firm. We do not negotiate with terrorists, including emotional terrorists.
*I'm reminded of a profoundly disturbing anti-drink driving PSA produced in Northern Ireland, in which a drunk driver accidentally kills a small child, the tagline of which was "Could you live with the shame?"
**What do I mean by that? I think we should have an explicit policy that it is tasteless and disrespectful to politicise the suicide of someone you've never met, or who you barely know. If Alice takes her own life and Bob (who never met Alice, nor interacted with her in any way) announces "Alice would still be with us here today, if it wasn't for [Bob's political hobby horse]", we should collectively recognise that this is tacky, gross and disrespectful to Alice's memory. This is true regardless of what Bob's pet issue happens to be. If, however, we have very good reason to believe that Alice actually did kill herself for political reasons (say, setting herself on fire while yelling "free Palestine"), that's fair game.
***Some months ago, I read an article on Substack by a female psychologist (it may have been Hannah Spier, but I can't find the specific article I'm thinking of), in which she argued that, contrary to widespread claims that it's a personality disorder whose sufferers deserve our sympathy, borderline is in fact an evolutionarily beneficial constellation of traits which certain women use to accomplish what they want. She agrees with Scott that borderline (which is far more common in women) and antisocial personality disorder (far more common in men) are essentially the same condition. "Sufferers" of both conditions are prone to making violent threats in interpersonal relationships in order to get what they want: the difference is that, because men are bigger and stronger than women, these threats tend to be directed outwards ("if you break up with me, I'll kill you"), whereas women tend to direct them inwards ("if you break up with me, I'll kill myself"). It was a provocative and unsettling
Catch-22's famous catch-22 is not a dilemma actually resulting from an exercise of logic. Wanting to be grounded is consistent with sanity, but it doesn't prove you are sane. Claiming that if you want to be grounded, you are therefore sane isn't reasoning; it's just abuse of soldiers dressed up as reasoning. This also applies in reverse to the court case, of course. Predicting that you might kill yourself is consistent with the kind of insanity that makes you unable to predict your own actions, but it doesn't prove it.
What is really wrong here may be the way judges make up whatever ruling they want and try to justify it in a way that sounds good. Naturally doing this will result in rulings that don't make sense and have bad implications.
"Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing."
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