This essay will start with answering the opposite, how is the mind not governed. The notion that the mind governs itself is propagated by pre-21st century science, embodied in the medical theory of mental disorder, that the mind can spontaneously "disorder itself". To understand why that is not so, it is important to understand the difference between mental illness, better understood as "meme illness" (Leigh, 2010), pathological memes that reflect failure in the government of the mind, and mental disorder, the notion that the mind can disturb the government of itself. Psychiatry, the science, is the study of mental disorders, not of mental illness.

The idea that the mind can disturb the government of itself assumes, or is predicated on, that the mind is governed by itself. It is not. The government of the mind is done by cognitive systems that are external to it, what is called the executive function of the brain (Pribram, 1973), analogous to the concept of will. The executive function is not mental, therefore, the theory of mental disorder is a causal impossibility, the equivalent of spontaneous generation theory for infections that was disproven with the work of Louis Pasteur and John Tyndall in the mid-19th century.

Synapses

Pribram, K. H. (1973). The primate frontal cortex: Executive of the brain. In K. H. Pribram & A. R. Luria, Psychophysiology of the frontal lobes. Oxford, England: Academic Press.

Leigh, H., & Leigh, H. (2010). Genes, Memes, Culture, and Mental Illness. Springer NewYork. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5671-2