Adam Curtis traces how a narrow, game-theory version of freedom came to define modern life, across three episodes for the BBC. The story starts with John Nash and the RAND Corporation modeling humans as purely self-interested calculators, an idea born out of Cold War strategy that then leaked into economics, psychiatry, and government policy. Archival footage and interviews follow the theory into Britain and America, where politicians from Thatcher to Blair rebuilt welfare systems, hospitals, and schools around targets and incentives on the assumption that people only respond to self-interest. R.D. Laing's psychiatric theories and the era's obsession with mental freedom get folded into the same argument, along with the neoconservative push to export freedom by force in Iraq. Curtis's trademark method carries the series: found footage, needle drops, and a flat authoritative narration stitching together decades of policy documents and TV clips into one continuous argument. The conclusion is bleak, that a model built to describe paranoid Cold War adversaries ended up designing the institutions ordinary people now live inside.