There’s a well-worn saying, “Scientia Potentia Est”. It’s attributed to Sir Francis Bacon, but the actual origin is uncertain.
It has a lot of literary significance, because in any story what the characters know and when they know it has a lot to do with pushing the plot forward. Some genres, like mystery fiction, are all about the process of gaining a particular piece of knowledge, “whodunit” as the genre is often referred to. A particular piece of knowledge is often the MacGuffin in the plot.
Gaining a particular piece of information is very often the inciting incident of the story. The detective finds out that murder, or another crime, has been committed, and sets off on his quest to find the the truth. The fantasy heroes find out that the Dark Lord is returning. In my own series, the inhabitants of a world post a Request For Proposal to have someone save their world from the blind malice of the universe.
Information is not the same as knowledge, and it’s easy to confuse the two. Knowledge comes from information. Sticking with the example of a murder, quite a lot of information is needed to establish the single piece of knowledge that John Doe was a homicide victim.
A body was found, and competent experts, doctors or paramedics, checked and established that it was lifeless. Cause of death may be obvious, such as large-calibre gunshot wounds, or not. John Doe’s identity has to be established, which may be as easy as opening a wallet or as hard as finding a match among the myriads of missing persons in a country’s databases. All of this information has to come together to form the one piece of knowledge that John Doe was the victim of a homicide.
This knowledge will come to a lot of people once it hits the news and the grapevine. For many of them, the action they take in response will be limited to a moment of sympathy for the death of a faceless stranger, or a little coffee-cup gossip. The police officer(s) who catch the case have a positive duty to investigate. A grieving family member may choose to act on their own behalf. A private investigator may be hired to look into the matter. The murderer, of course, already knows.
The point here is that knowledge enables action, but it does not compel it. What use, if any, is made of knowledge is a choice of the individual character. These choices are also a root of conflict. The detective wants to solve the murder, the murderer wants to get away with it, and other members of the cast will act, or not, on that knowledge as they choose to do so. Those choices are driven by their own personal motives, which can vary widely.
The difference between information and knowledge is a fertile source of plot twists. Knowledge based on incomplete information can be wrong. The murder weapon was found J. R. Suspect’s sock drawer because the real murderer planted it there.
So, information enables action. A further limitation is that it enables only that action which is possible at the time. There are plenty of examples, but I’ll take one from history.
Much is often made of the failure to warn the commanders of Pearl Harbor that they were about to be attacked by the Japanese, or, more precisely, to give them access to the highly classified intelligence from the codebreakers in Washington. The refrain there is that if they had known, disaster would have been averted. That is a very questionable assumption.
On the eve of the attack, Pearl Harbor was nowhere near to being on a war footing, as has been documented in great detail. Given such warning, which would only have been a few hours, the commanders could only have taken such action as was possible in the time. Realistically, that was not much. A higher state of alert, recalling the crews of ships from ashore, ensuring that the junior officers on the radar watch were in fact awake and paying attention, which in the event they were not. None of which would have made much difference. The most powerful naval force in the Pacific was coming down upon them, with a crushing advantage in firepower.
The commanders at Pearl Harbor had already had the knowledge that war was imminent, and they chose not to act on it in the weeks and months before the attack, despite having repeatedly received written orders from their Commander-in-Chief to do so.
The flow of information from an event has a lot to do with its effects. The news of an inciting incident doesn’t spur action until it’s known to the characters. This can be seconds, minutes, days or years. How fast and in what direction the news spreads dictates a lot of the timeline.
Intelligence, defined as knowledge produced from information, does figure in my books. In the Master Blasters series, there’s the Entity Intelligence Unit. It doesn’t, as a rule, get much time on stage. They produce useful knowledge for the guys with their boots on the ground, then head back to the office. They aren’t infallible, either.
There are reasons for that. First, the production of intelligence is not a very glamorous endeavour. People at computers hammering away at the data doesn’t really generate a lot of drama, although in real life I can recall some spirited arguments. Second, knowledge is powerless until it is acted on. That power is only as great is the ability and the will to take action.
Sorry, Sir Francis Bacon, but your proverb doesn’t cut it with me. I’m going with the motto of the old Canadian Intelligence Corps. “Action From Knowledge”.
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