Penn Jillette: Reconciling Atheism with Libertarianism | Big Think

Penn Jillette: Reconciling Atheism with Libertarianism

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive video lessons from top thinkers and doers

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

PENN JILLETTE:

Penn Jillette is a cultural phenomenon as a solo personality and as half of the world-famous Emmy Award­-winning magic duo Penn & Teller. His solo exposure is enormous: from Howard Stern to Glenn Beck to the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. He has appeared on Dancing with the Stars, MTV Cribs, and Chelsea Lately and hosted the NBC game show Identity. As part of Penn & Teller, he has appeared more than twenty times on David Letterman, as well as on several other TV shows, from The Simpsons and Friends to Top Chef and The View. He co-hosts the controversial series Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, which has been nominated for sixteen Emmy Awards. He is currently co host of the Discovery Channel's Penn & Teller Tell a Lie and the author of God, No! and Presto!

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Penn Jillette:  Let me lay on you what Libertarianism is to me. Once again I’m speaking for myself which is about as Libertarian as you can get. I do not believe I know what’s best for other people. I also don’t believe that other people know what’s best for other people. I can barely make decisions for myself. I do my best to make decisions for my family. Should my ten-year-old son take music lessons? That’s a hard question for our family. Do you want to push him into it or wait until he really wants it? Those are hard decisions. I have trouble making those for my family so making the decision of what someone else’s job in healthcare should be like who is in another part of the country who I’ve never met is not something I’m qualified or desirous to do. That’s Libertarianism. Libertarianism is taking a right on money and your first left on sex and looking for utopia straight ahead. To me the way I was brought up in western Massachusetts, kind of a New England philosophy. We believed in responsibility and keeping your nose out of other people’s business. We believed in live and let live I think to a fault. My mom and dad were older parents too. My mom was 45 when I was born so I was raised by another generation. You see my mom would be whatever – 120 now or 115 now. A whole other generation.

My mom was born – now you’re going to see that my math is wrong. My mom was born in 1909. She’s dead now. So it’s a whole different generation. And my mom’s feeling about absolutely everything was who cares. Her whole feeling on the gay rights movement was who cares who they want to get together with. It doesn’t matter to me. Her whole feeling on drugs. I have never had a sip of alcohol or any recreational drug in my life. That was true for my mother, true for my father, true for my sister. I don’t know how many generations it goes back but never. And yet my mom always thought that sure, any drug should be legal. If you’re living in a free country do whatever you want. Take responsibility for it. When you tell people about Libertarianism you just tell them we think you should take as little from other people by force as possible. And you should be able to do whatever you think is right. Now that’s a pretty heavy thing I’m saying. Because I’m saying that if there’s an 18-year-old girl who is the greatest math whiz that we have in this country, let’s say she’s the smartest person in math we have anywhere. And let’s say we give her a full scholarship to go to whatever school she wants to go to – Stanford, MIT, wherever she wants to go. And she decides she wants to work at McDonald’s and get pregnant at the age of 19. That’s her decision.

Jim Morrison – did he have a worse life because he did an awful lot of drugs and died at 28? I don’t know. I’ve already lived a lot longer than Jim Morrison but were his choices worse than mine? I don’t know. I know I would not have liked to have lived like Jim Morrison although I’d like to look that good in leather pants. But Kurt Cobain. Did I want to live like that? No, not even slightly. Prince? I don’t want to live like that. But they probably don’t want to live like me either. Libertarianism is the strongest sense of please do what you want, try not to hurt me.

Our government has a monopoly on force, they have a monopoly on force. The government is the only organization that is supposed to be able to use for...

For the full transcript, check out