John Ruskin Consequence

For every action, there is always a consequence that follows. When it comes to the economy and politics, one single action has been able to change the whole world forever. As stated by John Ruskin, “What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.” What the author is trying to tell is that thoughts are useless without an action to follow. If a person wants to make a difference in society, they need to go out of their comfort zone, go the extra mile, and make a difference. Or, perhaps, a great thought can end up to be a waste.

With this in mind, Ruskin is pointing out an aspect about how people feel the need to follow others. They do what others expect them to do,

and sometimes that is not the righteous plan to execute. For example, in “Shooting an Elephant” by George Orwell, the narrator of the poem is conflicted and only shoots the elephant because it is what the people wanted him to do. There could be two sides to this story; however, because... The elephant did kill a man, but did the elephant deserve to be killed? Does not matter. None of it mattered because the officer shot and killed the elephant; no one could be certain of what he was feeling at the time it happened. The final sentence of the narrative ended with the statement, “I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool,” (Orwell). Here, lies the evidence of why he committed the action that he did, and it clearly exemplifies how many people, to this day, feel in high stress situations. None of it mattered in the end, he could not please anybody, but he could have gratified himself; nonetheless, he followed the basic beliefs of the masses for fear of a bad reputation.
Surely, there are more every day examples of how humans seem to go with the flow of others in order for their to be more favorable consequences. In “On Seeing England for the First Time” by Jamaica Kincaid, Kincaid feels overrun with English control; yet, still lived in the country she despised so much. From what was probably her perspective, she knew that no action she took against her hatred for the government would get her anywhere and, therefore, persisted through the irritation of being under British rule. It’s important to realize that while the narrator sat on the train, she thought to herself, “The person sitting next to me couldn’t give me a clue; no one person could. In any case, if I had said to her, I find England ugly, I hate England; the weather is like a jail sentence, the English are a very ugly people, the food in England is like a jail sentence, the hair of English people is so straight, so dead looking, the English have an unbearable smell so different from the smell of people I know, real people of course, she would have said that I was a person full of prejudice.” There was nothing for her to say, for if she stated her honest viewpoints on England, she would be criticized by the majority of people, and one can bet that she did not want to get in an additional argument. It’s an incommodious feeling to lack a sense of belonging along with one’s peers, and an accompanying altercation would just make matters worse.