Erich From, "Escape from Freedom," (1941).

"The pathetic superstition prevails that by knowing more and more facts one arrives at knowledge of reality. Hundreds of scattered and unrelated facts are dumped into the heads of students; their time and energy are taken up by learning more and more facts so that there is little left for thinking. To be sure, thinking without a knowledge of facts remain empty and fictitious; but "information" alone can be just as much of an obstacle to thinking as the lack of it.

One kind of smokescreen is the assertion that the problems are too complicated for the average individual to grasp... To let them appear so enormously complicated that only a "specialist" can understand them, and he only in his own limited field, actually-and often intentionally-tends to discourage people from trusting their own capacity to think about those problems that really matter. The individual feels helplessly caught in a chaotic mess of data and with pathetic patience waits until the specialists have found out what to do and where to go... The result of this kind of influence is a twofold one: one is a scepticism and cynicism towards everything which is said or printed, while the other is childish belief in anything that a person is told with authority.

Facts lose the specific quality which they can have only as parts of a structuralized whole and retain merely an abstract, quantitative meaning; each fact is just another fact and all that matters is whether we know more or less... we cease to be genuinely related to what we hear."