The 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil — who served as British Prime Minister three times at the turn of the 20th century — was not exactly a cheerleader for progress. But he was honest. Brutally honest. His most remembered quote says it all: “Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.” 

Salisbury was the ultimate conservative. He sincerely and genuinely believed that change always makes things worse — and that the status-quo, with all its flaws, is preferable to whatever chaos change might unleash, which it most certainly will. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it — and if it is broken, best not to touch it. Because you’ll only make things worse.

There’s a certain bleak wisdom to Salisbury’s worldview, and it sounds exactly like the sort of thing you’d expect from a 19th-century European aristocrat with a hereditary seat in the House of Lords. But Salisbury’s fear of change isn’t just a relic of the past. It’s a recurring force throughout history. 

Change terrifies people. And when that fear metastasizes, it becomes a pathology — and bad things tend to happen to those who spearhead change, and to challenge accepted norms. Because when someone comes along and quietly unravels the lies, dismantles the illusions, and gently questions the reigning orthodoxy — not with rage, not with violence, but with cold, logical reason — the system panics.

We’ve seen this before, time and again. Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t call for violent revolution — he preached nonviolence and the reconfiguration of a broken system. But he threatened the status quo with something far more destabilizing: clarity. And for that, he was killed. 

Robert F. Kennedy wasn’t storming barricades — he was addressing poverty, race relations, and the Vietnam War, trying to find a way forward that was different. But his calm conviction rattled too many cages. And for that, he was killed. 

Yitzhak Rabin attempted to create peace and hope for Israel — and for that, he was killed. 

Donald Trump also had a brush with death in Butler, Pennsylvania, during the 2024 election campaign, when a would-be assassin fired a bullet that grazed his ear — a few millimeters from changing history.

Truthfully, it doesn’t matter if the agent of change is right or wrong, loud or quiet, from the left or the right — when people perceive that someone is shifting the tectonic plates of the political or cultural landscape, fear sets in. And fear, when left unchecked, becomes violence.

And now we have the killing of Charlie Kirk — the latest casualty of the fear of change. Kirk, a right-wing influencer with an extraordinary reach into Gen Z, was just 31 years old. He was gunned down in broad daylight while speaking to students at Utah Valley University. 

Moments before his murder, he had been doing what he did best — engaging young people calmly, intelligently, and without fear or condescension. He stood before an audience of thousands, not to inflame them, certainly not to encourage hate, but to persuade them. And for that, he was killed.

Immediately after the announcement of Kirk’s death, Donald Trump called him “The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk… No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better.” Coming from someone who delights in exaggeration, that was no exaggeration. 

Kirk was uniquely gifted at reaching the very people our society claims to care about but so often fails to understand: disaffected youth struggling to find their political footing in an age of cynicism, manipulation, and institutional distrust.

There’s a chilling line buried in the long litany of curses in Parshat Ki Tavo — a statement by Moses you can easily gloss over or dismiss, until real life stops you in your tracks and the ancient words hit you between the eyes.

Moses begins the section by warning the Israelites not to abandon their moral compass or lose sight of the truth, or else they will descend into darkness. And among the consequences he spells out is this one (Deut. 28:34): “You will go mad from what your eyes see.”

To be clear, this is not a metaphor and it’s not a curse — it’s a prediction, and a diagnosis. A society that is frightened of truth, and of agents of change who prioritize truth over slogans, will eventually lose its collective mind. And then it will turn on the very people trying to save it.

The medieval commentator Ramban explains that this kind of madness is not clinical — it’s existential. It is, in fact, a divinely-sourced affliction on the intellect. When a society detaches itself from plain truth and spiritual grounding, it begins to lose its ability to think straight. Eventually, it sees good as evil, and honest debate as a subversive act. 

Ramban calls it a “strike on the mind” — a kind of blindness where people no longer recognize what is real and what is destructive. Moses is warning us that the results are always terrifying.

Sforno goes even deeper. He writes that this madness causes people to act against their own interests. They’re no longer just mistaken — they become destructive. They pursue what harms them, attack those trying to help them, and misjudge the very people who might lead them to a better place. 

In Sforno’s reading, “you will go mad from what your eyes see” means the world will become so upside-down, so saturated with chaos and distortion, that even when someone shows up with reason and hope, the collective instinct will be to destroy him.

There’s also a strange irony at play here — one that even the Marquess of Salisbury might have found too absurd to imagine. In today’s world, it’s the conservatives who are trying to change things, while the so-called progressives have become the reactionaries, frantically defending a broken, toxic status quo. 

The political compass has spun so wildly out of control that someone like Charlie Kirk — a conservative in ideology, but a radical in his willingness to confront cultural decay — was seen as a dangerous revolutionary, and killed. 

What would Salisbury have made of a world where not changing is what’s dragging us into the abyss? Where the only people trying to pull us back from the edge are the ones labeled as “extremists”? 

Charlie Kirk was a conservative, yes — but he was also a visionary who believed we didn’t have to accept the darkness and craziness that has engulfed the western world. He wanted to change things by bringing us back to our best selves. And for that, he was silenced.

Charlie Kirk said, “When you deliberately distort and selectively present the truth, you lie.” That wasn’t merely a clever observation — it was a moral compass. Charlie’s determined mission was to present the truth: undistorted, unfiltered, and without fear. 

And now that mission has been cut short — not by an opposing argument, but by a bullet. We are left with the unsettling fulfillment of Moses’ warning: “You will go mad from what your eyes see.” A society so overwhelmed by lies, and so afraid of actual truth, that it can no longer tolerate a calm voice of reason. That’s a society in the grip of madness. 

But madness is not destiny. It is a warning. If we can still hear voices like Charlie’s — and in the aftermath of his untimely death, if we can remember what he stood for — then perhaps we can begin, slowly and painfully, to pull ourselves back from the edge. The alternative is too dreadful to contemplate.

The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.