Sovereignty of Mind: The architects of PSYOP - Edward Bernays' Propaganda

What does it mean to possess sovereignty of mind? Sovereignty = self-determination. Mind = the organ and faculties of rational (pragmatic, discriminatory, logical, analytical) and creative (imaginal, aesthetic, emotional, artistic ) thought. In balance, the mind is able to solve problems, innovate and strategize to achieve the ideals and ideas we see in our mind's eye. Tip the scale in favor of rationalism and our behavior and perception can shift our personality into jadedness, anxiety, irritability, order and ritual obsessions, neuroticism. Tip the scale toward the creative faculty and we can become overly idealistic, impulsive, sensation-seeking, inclined toward fantasy / entertainment obsessions / avoidance strategies and psychotic. Quite a lot of research has gone into the correlation of personality in politics. Conservatives tend to be rational and neurotic. Liberals tend to be creative and psychotic.

Personality in Politics: Liberals, Conservatives, Myers-Briggs, & The Big Five
By A.J. Drenth
https://personalityjunkie.com/08/personality-politics-liberals-conservatives-myers-briggs-big-five/

I doubt anyone who has been paying attention to the political divide would dispute the generalization. The intensity is too stark to deny now. The question is: How did the great divide between Conservatives and Liberals happen? If it's organic and natural in the context of social evolution, it surely illustrates the near-absolute incompetency of social engineers in government and academia! Aren't these the 'smart', 'educated', 'well-informed' gatekeepers of society and civilization?

How could such an error in social planning and development occur? Every mistake in judgement arises out of incompetence, willful negligence, malicious intent, or a combination of these three causes. The hallmark of incompetence is lack of knowledge, the hallmark of willful negligence is the lack of conscientiousness, the hallmark of malicious intent is the presence of self-interest and a stronger tendency toward psychopathy than can be accommodated within a healthy, optimally functioning society. There is overwhelming evidence to support the assumption that the primary cause of the sociopolitical divide is the deliberate engineering of society to create, establish and maintain a socioeconomic environment that does accommodate the predatory, parasitic, cannibalistic psychopaths that walk among us.

Where's the proof of such a claim? Everywhere. But let's begin with Edward Bernays...

Noam Chomsky:
[The] American business community was also very impressed with the propaganda effort. They had a problem at that time. The country was becoming formally more democratic. A lot more people were able to vote and that sort of thing. The country was becoming wealthier and more people could participate and a lot of new immigrants were coming in, and so on.

So what do you do? It's going to be harder to run things as a private club. Therefore, obviously, you have to control what people think. There had been public relation specialists but there was never a public relations industry. There was a guy hired to make Rockefeller's image look prettier and that sort of thing. But this huge public relations industry, which is a U.S. invention and a monstrous industry, came out of the first World War. The leading figures were people in the Creel Commission. In fact, the main one, Edward Bernays, comes right out of the Creel Commission. He has a book that came out right afterwards called Propaganda. The term "propaganda," incidentally, did not have negative connotations in those days. It was during the second World War that the term became taboo because it was connected with Germany, and all those bad things. But in this period, the term propaganda just meant information or something like that. So he wrote a book called Propaganda around 1925, and it starts off by saying he is applying the lessons of the first World War. The propaganda system of the first World War and this commission that he was part of showed, he says, it is possible to "regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies." These new techniques of regimentation of minds, he said, had to be used by the intelligent minorities in order to make sure that the slobs stay on the right course. We can do it now because we have these new techniques.

This is the main manual of the public relations industry. Bernays is kind of the guru. He was an authentic Roosevelt/Kennedy liberal. He also engineered the public relations effort behind the U.S.-backed coup which overthrew the democratic government of Guatemala.

His major coup, the one that really propelled him into fame in the late 1920s, was getting women to smoke. Women didn't smoke in those days and he ran huge campaigns for Chesterfield. You know all the techniques—models and movie stars with cigarettes coming out of their mouths and that kind of thing. He got enormous praise for that. So he became a leading figure of the industry, and his book was the real manual.
--From Chomsky's "What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream": a talk at Z Media Institute, June 1997

Full text of Edward Bernays' Propaganda available at:
http://www.historyisaweapon.org/defcon1/bernprop.html

History and Politics relating to Edward Bernays
http://www.criticalthink.info/webindex/bernays.htm

Image Source: Critical Thinking website