The problem with interventionism is that modern societies need to use fragmented knowledge. If an authority, such as a state, intervenes according to some specific plan, it can only use the knowledge the authority has access to. However most of the knowledge is scattered among individuals, and no authority can gather it. For in the act of gathering it the particulars of the knowledge would need to be approximated. Such as the knowledge that a particular manager has about his own business. When a state intervenes according to a plan for the economy, it necessarily will base that plan on limited knowledge, most of the knowledge needed to make a "good" plan is scattered among the individuals, outside of the reach of centralized authorities. So for a society to make use of as much knowledge as possible, individuals need to be free to realize their own plans to as great a degree as possible. Such is my understanding of one of the Austrian economist F.A Hayek's ideas about the use knowledge in society.

What about an ensemble setting up a play?

That might sound a little abstract. If you can't translate abstractions into something concrete it usually means you have no idea what you are talking about. So let me try to concretize this with a real-life example and test myself according to that criteria.

Earlier this year, I was in charge of the music when working with a theater ensemble. Me and the director were discussing how to perform a certain scene and then I just realized; nobody here knows how to do this play. The knowledge needed to perform it is divided up amongst all the individuals. They are all crucial, and it is not possible to micromanage them from the top. If they were lifeless automatons, putting together this play would be a nightmarish difficult thing to do. In a sense it would be impossible, controlling everybody, their voices, their movements, their expressions and so on would turn it into a completely different play. It would turn it into the play I and the director could have imagined, but that would disregard all the imagination of the actors in the play.

I thought this was an example of Hayek's point about knowledge, here in how it is scattered amongst the individual performers of the play.

I. Where should the actors go during a choreographed dance?

Since we were leading the group we had an overarching view of what should happen during one of the choreographed dances. But the overall plan would not have worked without the actors who were all responding to each other's movement in the moment. In a particular actor's mind something like "when she goes up the box I will go there". There was also a degree of improvisation to the dances so the actors had to respond to each other's movement, within the context of how their specific character was moving at that time. A lot of that was in the form of inexplicit knowledge, that would have been difficult or in practice impossible even for the actors themselves to describe.

The knowledge needed to perform a dance was thus scattered amongst the individuals.

II. How an actor finds their specific character.

Every actor needed to find their voice within each character. What was this character about, how does he/she walk, move, talk, etc? The drama teacher had more experience with acting and could provide guidance to the ensemble, but in the end, the characters took on a life of their own. Each actor had created unique knowledge about how their character came to life.

Here again, the knowledge of each character was divided up amongst them.

III. When the music should start and stop

I composed the music but did not play anything during the play. There were two musicians, pianist and a saxophonist and they had to start and stop according to cues in the play. In the beginning, I designed the overall structure for when the music should start and stop, but as is usual with plays like this, things change when working with the material. Something works better here, music needs to go away there, and before I knew it I did not know as much as the musicians knew about the music. The cues were a kind of knowledge I could have quite easily gathered in. But playing is much more than that. There is the question of how loud they needed to play, how they should respond to the emotion of this specific character. These are things that you only get by doing the work in the moment.

The knowledge-centered view

As David Deutsch has explained, knowledge is a type of information that has causal power. If you start looking at the world through that lens, you start seeing the effect of knowledge in the world. The knowledge in genes necessary to grow into a tree. The knowledge in the beaver's genome turns the tree into a dam. Not to mention of course the enormous amount of knowledge needed to build a city. But also more intangible things, the knowledge in the western tradition and institutions which create peaceful individuals who respect each other. Or in the case here, the knowledge needed to stage a performance of a play. Too much knowledge for one individual to gather up. And we were just a group of 10 people, imagine a society, even a small one like Sweden. 10 million individual minds.

In Hayek's book Law, Legislation and Liberty he demonstrates how "the utopian fallacy" causes us into error by disregarding most of the knowledge that make up a society. If it becomes obvious how we should change society according to a specific plan, this is because the person is ignorant of most of the facts that make up the order of a society. In other words, the seeming clarity of the vision is due to ignorance.

So it is with grand plans for society, but also for plays. Let individuals as far as possible realize their own goals. Things will work out better that way.