100 Years Ago: Drowning in Data

—“What a Demagogue Knows” by Garet Garrett, from the February 7, 1925, issue of The Saturday Evening Post

In one issue of a newspaper there are more facts to be dealt with than the average man of the Dark Ages encountered in a lifetime. There is more news than he can read. New knowledge pursues and overwhelms him. Each day there is so much more to know, to believe and to disbelieve. The capacity of the human mind to receive impressions, so far as we know, is constant. It probably has not changed in 5,000 years.

Yet in one lifetime the size of a newspaper has increased tenfold. And that is only one form of the daily demand upon the faculty of attention. Knowledge has increased faster than wisdom and far beyond it, since there’s no evidence the sum of human wisdom has increased at all.

Hence the headlong flight from the confusion of facts into caves of refuge — movies, novels, radio, jazz.

This article is featured in the January/February 2025 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.