<< Critique: not as a Worry nor Dismissal, but as Co-creative Collective Path-maker>>


In exploring this statement, I wish to take the opportunity to focus on, extrapolate and perhaps contextualize the word “worry” a bit here.

I sense “worry” touches on an important human process of urgency.

What if… we were to consider who might/could be “worried”, and, when “worry” is confused or used as a distracting label. Could this give any interesting insight into our human mental models and processes (not of those who do the worrying but rather of those using the label)?

The term might be unwittingly resulting as if a tool for confusion or distraction (or hype). I think to notice that “worry,” “opposition,” “reflection,” “anxiety” and “critical thought-exercises,” or “marketing rhetorics toward product promotion,” are too easily confused. [Some examples of convoluted confusions might be (indirectly) hinted at in this article: here —OR— here ]

To me, at least, these above listed “x”-terms, are not experienced as equatable, just yet.

As a species, within which a set of humans claims to be attracted to innovation, we might want to innovate (on) not only externals, or symptoms, but also causes, or inherent attributes to the human interpretational processes and the ability to apply nuances therewith, eg, is something “worrying” or is it not (only) “worrying” and perhaps something else / additional that takes higher urgency and/or importance?

I imagine that in learning these distinctions, we might actually “innovate”.

Engaging in a thought-exercise is an exercise toward an increase of considering altered, alternative or nuanced potential human pathways, towards future action and outcomes, as if exploring locational potentials: “there-1” rather then “there-2” or “there-n;” and that rather than an invitation for another to utter: “don’t worry.”

If so, critical thought might not need to be a subscription to “worry” nor the “dismissal” of 1 scenario, 1 technology, 1 process, 1 ideology, etc, over the other [*1]

Then again, from a user’s point of view, I dare venture that the use of the word “worry” (as in “I worry that…”) might not necessarily be a measurable representation of any “actual” state of one’s psychology. That is, an observable behavior or interpreted (existence of an) emotion has been said to be no guaranteed representation of the mental models or processes of they who are observed (as worrying). [a hint is offered here —OR— here ]

Hence, “worry” could be / is at times seemingly used as a rhetorical tool from either the toolboxes of ethos, pathos or logos, and not as an externalization of one’s actual emotional state of that ephemeral moment.

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[*1]

Herein, in these distinctions, just perhaps, might lie a practical excercise of “democracy”.

If critical thought, rhetoric, anxiety, opposition are piled and ambiguously mixed together, then one might be inclined to self-censor due to the mere sense of overwhelming confusion of not being sure to be perceived as dealing with one over, or instead of, the other.