Utopia Justifies The Means Discussion - Television Tropes & Idioms

[[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/discussion.php?id=glm0dnr6&trope=UtopiaJustifiesTheMeans

From YKTTW]] Sikon: "Sailor Pluto is deliberately engineering a timeline where 95% of the Earth's population is killed off in a thousand-year glaciation period in order to produce Crystal Tokyo"? I like that one. Unlike most Sailor Moon Epileptic Trees, it actually makes sense and ties nicely with the Deconstruction-esque idea of dystopian Crystal Tokyo, as well as with Sailor Pluto enjoying her Omniscient Morality License. This should probably be added to Wild Mass Guessing...

Rebochan: I don't really think that should be here. This is the first I've heard of it. We can put it in Fan Wank or Fanon, but since nothing in the show even comes close to suggesting this, it's on the wrong page.

Fast Eddie: Crimeny, folks. Neon Genesis Evangelion is 11 years old. Watchmen is over 20 years old. What in the world do they need spoiler font for?

Jefepato: Because not everyone's seen or read them. Neither of those is anywhere near It Was His Sled status, and short of that, there's no reason not to use spoiler font.

Phartman: I'm kind of thinking that if you've made it 10 or 20 years without watching a particular anime, you're probably never going to. Nevertheless, go ahead and keep 'em covered.

Kilyle: Completely disagree, Phartman: At the end of six years of college I was just discovering the edge of anime, and I'm sure there are numerous landmark series that I haven't yet seen, but that I wouldn't wish spoiled. I think it would be different if anime were not imported, or if I lived in Japan.

On another note: Finally got this page working, I see — great! I like the title pretty well, and it looks like this narrows Aesoptinum to the point where it's a workable trope, and examples can be directly compared. Don't have the time now to investigate what Aesoptinum looks like at present, but it's a good supertrope and I'm sure you guys have come up with some good subtropes within it. Kudos!

A Carlssin: Doctor Who... Invasion of the Dinosaurs... I can't remember the details!

Eran of Arcadia: At the risk of political pontification, i am not sure that the real life examples are that good; including one mediocre president along with some of the greatest dictators of all time won't make sense to many people 10 years from now or outside the US. Just my opinion perhaps.

Brickman: Is it me, or does listing George Bush as a real life example (next to such favorites as Hitler and Lenin) seem to be slightly bad taste? "Slighly" meaning "completely"? Not to mention more than a bit of a stretch—started a war on the grounds of preventing potential attacks from the same people (or at least claimed to, at least part of the time), wheras the rest of that list were trying to transform their own country's entire structure to be something they liked better through violence and/or genocide. Giving another country a less violent government may have been a goal, but it's nothing next to anyone else on that list. I'm going to remove it until someone gives a good arguement to the contrary.

Kilyle: Thank you for staying vigilant. We don't need that kind of comment on here.

Fake Nog: I do think you could make a case for PNAC aspiring to this trope, but Bush? Nehh. (Although, uh, Eran Of Arcadia? Leaving him on the list would make loads of sense to at least some people outside the U.S.)

Komanda: I dunno about you, but it would seem to me that Darth Caedus (or Jacen Solo, your mileage may differ) ought to be here as he genuinely believes he is doing all he does for the good of the galaxy. A 'Selfless Sith', if you will.

Cambias: I'm not sure the Fahrenheit 451 reference is entirely accurate about the society being a Utopia. The people are told it's a Utopia — but at one point the main character is out taking a walk and sees the sky black with bombers. I think it's more of a "Dystopia with good publicity."

Austin: "Any Enlightened Despotism will work - for the lifetime of the despot. Or the lifetime of the despot's sanity. What then? The message is more like, "In our world, no one is raped, murdered, or robbed. But we don't allow people to learn how to handle things themselves, so when we're all dead, insane, or senile, the whole species will be victims. Oh well."

I question how valid this is. We knew the Justice Lords were in control of the world, but we didn't see how everything was set up, or whether they had any plans for when they died. Heck, Superman's pretty much immortal himself, since I've never heard of a story where he dies from old age. On an additional note, arresting someone for threatening to not pay for food isn't jumping off the slippery slope. Refusing to pay for a service is a crime.

Austin: I've decided to remove it. It may be a good point, but it's not brought up in the episode and not a given reason why the Justice Lords were wrong, so it's irrelevant.

Although to be fair, at least Castro was closer to creating a utopia than others. It has the fourth best healthcare in the world , in which it has the second highest doctor to civilian ratio, second only to Italy. Is one of the most literate countries in Latin America , and has a greater racial harmony in its diverse demographics (we all starve equally.) However, it has a habit of paying small salary to good workers and imprisoning homosexuals for "social deviancy".
- Most of the above claims, however, have been refuted — most recently by video footage smuggled out of the country by those selfsame doctors, showing the wretched conditions in their filthy, rat-infested hospitals.... to say nothing of the testimony of the thousands of refugees who paddled their way through shark-infested waters to escape this utopia. As always, the claims of the dictators in charge, and the intellectual elite fawning upon them, stand in stark contrast to the actuality.

HeartBurn Kid: It's natter, and it borders on a political flame war. Deleted.

Adam C: Okay, The Justice Lords episode of Justice League? It's devolved into Conversation on the Main Page over if the evil alternate Justice League was justified or not. I editted the conversation down and added a bit more to the original entry about how it's an "even-handed example."

How well done this was is arguable, because while the Justice Lords were jerks, the episode could be seen as delivering the message "In our world, no one is raped, murdered, or robbed. But we don't have freedom of speech, so it's not worth it."
- Precisely. And people are LOBOTOMISED if the Justice Lords decide their a threat. Proof that there's truly no such thing as Utopia. It's a mad dream, best left to the imagination of fools and psychopaths. After all, let's not forget that every despot, tyrant and fascist thought that the world they were trying to create was "Better" as well.
- But you're missing the other side of the coin: every nice and good person in history ALSO thought they were creating a better world. In fact, everyone who ever intentionally caused any big change - good or bad - thought they were creating a "better" world, according to some definition of "better." So if your definition of "utopia" is "anything that anyone considers to be a better world," then yes, it's responsible for most of the bad things in human history - and most of the good things, too. It's responsible for change in general.
- Better =/= Perfect. Trying to improve things is different from saying "All problems will be solved if I am in charge, and the more power I have the more they will be solved." Only the latter is an example of this trope.

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