conformity is selfish

In the face of relentless social pressure, young humans become more selfish, not less. In order to adapt their behavior to meet strict group demands, they learn to see themselves through the eyes of the group and suppress any threatened behaviors because group exlusion is abandonment/death. Group complaints and compliments both reveal expectations. The obsessive, heightened self-watching that results is heightened selfishness. Conformist behavior can be summarized as "self-preservation by self-obsession." The demand for selflessness reveals the selfishness of the demander, who will mask the parochial selfishness of his demands with appeals to universal truth.

In the face of adult expectations, the young have two basic reponses available to them, resistance or submission. To submit is to join the ranks of the selfish. To resist is to make oneself a punching bag. Simply not understanding is a third possibility, I guess, but it hasn't worked out well for bison and whales and apes. In other words, if you can't serve, the humans will likely try to destroy you.

the meaning of democracy

Democracy, as the term is used on Sunday morning talk shows and in casual political conversations, is, first and foremost, the inside (good side) of a value judgment set up in opposition to dictatorships (and, in academic contexts, oligarchies as well). It primarily serves as a tool for the content-free assignation of good guy and bad guy roles, a way to let people know who to cheer for. The terms are so embedded in western political discourse that any actual dictator who said "I am a dictator" would simply be taken as meaning "I'm bad," as opposed to making a claim about the structure of the government he plays a part in.

U.S.-allied dictators like the Royal Sauds and 1980s Hussein and Pinochet are assigned the good-guy-compatible term "strong men sometimes prone to excesses" while authoritarian governments, like the world's drone leader, that abuse domestic populations while setting up polling places where the abused can go now and then to symbolically pledge their obedience, call themselves democracies.

just show them your badge

There's nothing wrong, superficially, with the NYT headline "With Bags of Cash, C.I.A. Seeks Influence in Afghanistan" outside the headline writer's warranted expectation that the reader's association of a band of professional killers with "us, therefore good" is enough to offset the conclusion any intelligent, unindoctrinated adult would come to, that the C.I.A. has been engaging in some serious criminal activity.

Interesting too is the use of the present tense. It is not the case that the C.I.A. was seeking influence via bribery but was caught and is now dealing with the sort of repercussions criminals have to deal with when they're caught. The C.I.A. "seeks" influence with bags of cash, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Maybe they don't want to, maybe it's a bit dirty, but in the end it's for the greater good, regardless of actual outcomes because their intentions are good because they're us and we're the good guys in this drama. It would be wrong to want bad things to happen to good guys.

So what I'm getting at, I guess, is that the term "C.I.A." itself is a propaganda term containing all the necessary information to determine whether the attempted crime in question, described in the headline with unusual accuracy, is something that good people support or oppose. Replace "C.I.A." with "Al-Qaeda affiliate" and note the dramatic change in meaning.    

normative and descriptive

Normativity ("ought" statements, as contrasted with descriptive "is" statements) is nothing more than an expression of desire with regard to a particular state of affairs, that one would like that state of affairs to be X as often as possible, as opposed to the W, Y, Z, and maybe imperfectly, inconsistently X, that it is. Normativity is a complaint. When spoken, the purpose is to externalize the impetus for action, with oneself as a starting point. Normativity means using ideas to make the world more to one's liking, however valid that liking may be. The self is always right.

Even those of us who warn against narrative use it. Anti-narrative is narrative. We just want to use it in a way that's not primarily self (or own-group) serving. We want to make the descriptive normative.

Descriptive statements happen when we don't care, or pretend not to.

yes, well, i killed her but my conscious mind was free of contradictions so...

"Good intentions" means nothing more than a conscious self cleansed of contradiction. Self is the only part of world where "good" exists and necessarily remains good, or god, as long as it is. The most vile act, even when recognized as such, is consumed, incorporated by conscious self. Stalin was "what good is" in Stalin's brain. Anything else that was good in that brain (for example, obedient serfs) was leeching off of Stalin's self-perceived goodness. The self-loathing Christian is redeemed by his Christianity, even if he, the individual is not. Even the kamikaze pilot is redeemed by the greater self.

The phrase "good intentions" says little or nothing about those aspects of human brains that actually have us acting. Actions, on the other hand...

it was not the mouse but the thugs who put bostonians on their chairs

The people of Boston locked their doors, then remained frozen and helpless, perched high on kitchen chairs as gun-wielding toughs roamed the city and ransacked their homes in search of a little mouse, which was, finally, found and caged.

Bostonians were deemed, in the national psychosis, badass. They received good on ya's, don't mess with bostons, fuck yeahs. For being good little children. They were rewarded for their cowardice with head pats.

Other terrorists, they of the suits and uniforms, just killed a dozen children in somewhere-over-there-istan. No one is afraid of them. You can tell because they walk free, receive applause, respect. Or do they walk free and enjoy accolades because everyone is afraid of them?

objects are dirty

I can see the appeal, but it's a pretty bad idea to try to resolve the subject-object dilemma by declaring everything object. Now you take what has been cast aside as other -- the object, already denigrated by an I-here-us system, a value system, as outside and therefore shitty -- as some kind of, ahem, objective truth, whatever the fuck that is.