"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.

Feynman, in one of his Caltech lectures, echoed the same thing with regard to science.

The easiest person to deceive is yourself. After you've gotten past that, science proceeds as any other conversation: You make a claim and others dispute it, examine it, analyze it. But being brutally honest with yourself, that's hard.


And that's also the crux critical thinking. Most believe critical thinking is first and foremost a tool to be used against opponents. But that's easy. It requires little training and absolutely no discipline. Even when opponents are dead-on correct, we don't like to admit that as we look for flaws, problems, inconsistencies, mistakes, and even typos.


However, outsourcing evaluation of your argument--or mental state--to those who have a vested interest in denying either any sort of validity, is also a problem.