There's a catch

"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." It's the best catch there is.

Heller had done his homework on logic problems. He would have known about Morton's Fork: John Morton was the Lord Chancellor of England in 1487, under Henry VII. He said if the subject lived in luxury he had enough to pay tax. If the subject lived frugally, he must have squirreled some savings and could therefore pay tax. Whichever way you turn, you lose.

Heller knew about Double Bind problems too: a classic example of a negative double bind is of a mother telling her child that she loves him while at the same time turning away in disgust. The child doesn't know how to respond and because it is dependent on the mother for basic needs, so it falls in to a terrible quandary. Welcome to the Catch-22.

The hippies could see the Catch-22 during the Vietnam War. It's the madness of B52 strikes, of burning villages to save them. It's Dr Strangelove's 'No fighting in the war room', and we still follow this river of thought in modern classic war films such as Full Metal Jacket which put a new take on the Mickey Mouse Club theme song.

There were bad guys in the book but none worse than Colonels Korn and Cathcart. They were evil personified. They just wanted Yossarian to like them, to buy in to the program, to sell his soul, as they raised the number of missions. One of my favourite lines: "The Colonel was certainly not going to waste his time and energy making love to beautiful women unless there was something in it for him."

The book was widely recognized as a deadly accurate metaphorical portrait of the nightmarish conditions in which America was engulfed in the 50s and 60s. There were the fiascoes of the Eisenhower Presidency, the Korean War, the sordid inquisitions of the McCarthy era and the Rosenberg executions.

We have similar fiascos in Iraq, Afghanistan and with our refugee policy. I can't remember how many places across the world Australian troops are fighting and dying.

50 years later, we can see that the situation Heller describes has, if anything grown more complicated, deranged and perilous than it was in 1944 or 1961 or 2011.

Catch-22's black humor, surrealism and grotesque metaphors dramatised the unreality yet there is a faint glimmer of hope at the end of the book with the story of Orr, but it's very faint.

But don't let it get you down. Just remember, "Anything worth dying for, is certainly worth living for."