When the evening's TV lineup is lame — which is most nights — I occasionally break out the Kindle Fire and troll YouTube for interesting documentaries and the like. I found one last week titled "The Century of the Self," a four-part BBC production from 2002 detailing the rise of propaganda and public relations, and how the theories of Sigmund Freud and other psychologists turned the United States (and to a lesser extent Europe) into the supremely narcissistic society we've come to know and love. Or loathe.

Citizens were turned into "consumers" via products and ads aimed at their innermost desires. Then came the anti-materialistic hippie backlash of the 1960s; corporate America adapted by pitching consumer products as a way to express yourself.

Your clothes made a statement. Today, so does your iPhone skin, or your iPhone itself.

But what struck me most was director Adam Curtis' contention that our politics, too, are shaped by these corporate messages aimed at our innermost desires. Indeed, he suggests the election of both Ronald Reagan in America and Margaret Thatcher in Britain were the direct result of this new cult of individualism, this focus on the self.

Stanford University researchers, who at the time were working with corporate America to better market trinkets to shag-carpeted "be all you can be" types, noticed that people who identified as "self-directed" loved Reagan and Thatcher. Reagan said government was the problem; Thatcher famously declared that there is no such thing as society. Both appealed to the idea of the individual who had been liberated from society's constraints — and perhaps wished to be free of governmental constraints, too.

I always wondered how it was that people who protested the war in Vietnam turned around 12 or 13 years later and voted for Reagan, and watch Fox News today. Here was an answer, if not the answer. It's all about you — you, the individual who can make better decisions than the collective society or government. You, who wants only to be free. I'll bet few Tea Party Patriots went to the Esalen Institute. But in a crucial way, their movement is a direct descendent of it.

But there's a catch to all this, a crucial one. Movement conservatism is indeed rooted in the idea that the individual's decision to make his or her own decisions is sacrosanct —  except in one key area: sexuality.

The biggest backers of economic freedom are often the biggest detractors of sexual freedom. And vice versa, of course. The left wants government to lift restrictions on gay marriage but impose more restrictions on, say, Wall Street.

That's an oversimplification, to be sure, and not everyone falls into these neat little categories. But I've always thought that the "Don't Tread on Me" banner flown by Tea Party activists could (and should) be adopted by those who advocate marriage equality. It's the same concept, whether we wish to acknowledge it.

The folk singer Donovan wrote, "Freedom is a word I rarely use without thinking." But I find that we usually use it without thinking, or thinking too deeply. We advocate freedom, but only some freedoms. And yet no one is truly free unless he is free to make choices that anger others, who view those choices as harmful or immoral.

Alternately, perhaps we might concede that "freedom" can become anarchy. Might it not be rationally concluded that some constraints upon "freedom" are necessary for a civil, cohesive society? Political freedom, freedom of speech, those things must always remain expansive. But what is our responsibility to one another, to this society as a whole?

That's exactly what we're trying to figure out at this moment in history, isn't it?

Gil Smart is associate editor of the Sunday News. Email him at gsmart@lnpnews.com, or phone 291-8817.