The complex and revelatory documentaries of Adam Curtis (e.g. Century of the Self, The Trap, The Power of Nightmares) provide fertile sources of hypotheses for social, cultural, and political psychologists. Most provocative are his iconoclastic examinations of how ideas usually thought to be liberal, left-of-center, or even deeply subversive can rival and even outperform traditionalist conservative ideas for grounding rigidly elitist relations of power and fuelling costly and destructive wars. Curtis admits to but is not interested in the often-noted ironies that attended the history of collective good-seeking communism in the 20th Century, or of collective good-seeking religions throughout most of human history. He is more interested in illuminating the ironies plaguing societies that embrace individual liberty above the collective good, and that set themselves in violent opposition to societies embracing the opposite prioritization of values. His understated plea is not to abandon individual liberty, but rather to reconsider the Western liberal inclination to condemn the pursuit of the common good as a slippery slope to tyranny. With empirical evidence from research on social capital, "coolness", and religious attitudes, I will argue a related but somewhat different point: the civil and political liberties most revered in the Western tradition are likely nurtured independently both by freethinking individualism and by devoted concern for wholeness and the collective good.