Adam Curtis traces how a narrow, paranoid model of human behavior built during the Cold War came to define modern freedom. The series opens with John Nash and the game theorists at the RAND Corporation, who modeled people as self-interested calculators distrustful of everyone else, an idea developed to plan nuclear strategy against the Soviets. Curtis follows that logic as it escapes the military and colonizes economics, politics, and psychiatry, with R.D. Laing's theories about the self and Isaiah Berlin's idea of negative liberty both pulled into the story of how governments in Britain and America rebuilt public life around markets, targets, and quantifiable choice instead of trust. Archival interviews, Cold War footage, and Curtis's own clipped narration carry the argument across three episodes, ending with the West's attempts to export this same freedom by force in Iraq and elsewhere. The case Curtis makes is that a system meant to liberate people from tyranny left them isolated, suspicious, and managed rather than free.