Bill Clinton: Learning to Work with Others | Big Think

I do. I do. Look, I have always said this: in the history of my country, only two governors of very small states have ever been elected president. A man named Franklin Pierce, the governor of New Hampshire in 1852, was picked just because he was the most inoffensive person around as we headed toward the Civil War. He was a very good man, by the way, and underrated as a person, but his presidency was a failure because he couldn't hold the country together, and me.

And I always told people that I considered the fact that I was the governor of a very small state and the last generation, part of the last generation of Americans to grow up without a television, to be one of the reasons that I did get elected president. We didn't get a TV until I was almost ten years old, and we didn't get a computer till my daughter was about four years old. So, I grew up in an oral culture of storytelling, and I was raised by highly intelligent people, most of whom had very limited formal education, but they were highly intelligent.

I was taught to listen and to observe and to pay attention and to listen to other people's stories. I was taught that everybody's got a story. I was taught that every life had some inherently interesting part of it but that most people can't get it out. And if they could get it out, if everybody could tell their story, it would be interesting.

Around the dinner table at my great uncle's house, for example, who spent a lot of time raising me when my mother was widowed by the time I was born, my great uncle was the smartest guy in our family. I bet his IQ was 185, and he had like no formal education, but he could literally have you in tears in three minutes talking about some totally otherwise non-descript person in our hometown and telling the story of their lives. Just laughing, crying, he was a genius.

So, before - if you were a kid around the table, before you could tell a story, you had to be able to listen to one. We would be asked, the children, after somebody told a story at lunch or dinner, "Did you understand the story?" If you said yes, then you would be asked, "Okay, what did you hear?" After you proved that you could listen and recount what you heard, then you could tell a story, but not until.

I think that you can teach people first the big fact. Our differences are important. They make life interesting. But since nobody is capable of being in possession of the whole truth about anything, our common humanity matters more. So you owe everybody a certain presumption of respect until they do something to forfeit it, and you should be listening. And we should teach people that. We should teach people how other people view the world differently from us, how other people have experienced life differently from us.

It's a discipline. It's a learned gift, and it's part of some cultures and not part of others. I grew up in a highly segregated, racially segregated southern town with a grandfather who ran a grocery store where most of his customers were African-Americans. So, I grew up knowing people that most white kids didn't know. I learned just - nobody had to tell me; I learned that intelligence was evenly distributed. I learned that dignity was something shared by all people. I just learned it. I deserve no credit for it. I was raised in a certain way.

I think that all that can be taught. I also think that I agree with what you said, but I think there's another skill that needs to be taught. That you can't necessarily learn even if you're a computer whiz or if you're a news or political junkie and you read 50 blogs a day. And that is how to organize all that you know. I mean, one of the reasons - I should be interviewing you today. One of the reasons that I love your columns, and I love your commentary, is that you help people to synthesize things that they know, sort of, that is you may write a column or do a commentary and not state one single fact that most of your listeners or readers don't already know, but they haven't put it together as you have.

And we live in a time where an eight-year-old can get on the computer and find out in 30 seconds things that I had to go to university to learn, right? It's pretty scary, but it's true. That doesn't mean that the eight-year-old understands the significance of whatever that is in terms of 15 other things. So I think getting along with other people is important, but I also think the ability to sympathize is important.

Otherwise, you could take everything you read -- I mean, just look at what's on the news every day or what's in the newspaper; it's like the political equivalent of chaos theory in physics. How do you connect the dots? So, I think learning to deal with other people and then learning to connect the dots are the two great mega educational skills we need to impart in every country at every level of development.