Bureaucratic Logic and Catch 22

First rule of any negotiation is to know who is who, which is also a necessity of political competition. A corollary might come from Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, “It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference who wins the war to someone who’s dead.” And, “The enemy, … is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on.”

In other words if some person tells you to go into the corner and choke yourself, are you going to do it?

A self-perpetuating bureaucracy may create its own theatre of the absurd.