—“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.
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Comments
Fascinating, and not entirely surprising considering how much more accelerated things had become following World War I.
Today we have to tune a lot more out because it is all too much otherwise. Trying to “keep up” with everything is basically impossible and not worth bothering with in the first place as most is just fuel to feed mainly unnecessary media outlets.
Heaven forbid Mr. Garrett were alive today in 2025! The explosion of mass and social media, I’m sure, would have him speechless and apoplectic!