Utopia Justifies The Means - Television Tropes & Idioms

Justice Lord Hawkgirl: Remember when everyone liked us?
Justice Lord Green Lantern: Since when does that matter to you?
Justice Lord Hawkgirl: Since I started seeing the fear on everyone's face.
Justice Lord Green Lantern: You wanna talk about fear? When I was a kid, I went to bed every night scared that the whole world was gonna blow up. That's the way things were back then; folks just accepted it. They didn't think there could be a better way. But we found one.

—Justice League - A Better World Part 1

It's a place built out of dreams and starlight; the name "Utopia" is a somewhat poignant pun by its author, literally meaning simultaneously "Good Place" and "No Place" in Greek, and despite (or perhaps because of) its unattainable nature, it has endured in myth and dreams since.

While dreaming about what it would be like is harmless (like how topless supermodel volleyball teams would be the national sport, bureaucrats would work recycling paper, and ice cream is just as delicious with none of the calories... Mmmm...) it's still a dream. For the Fallen Hero, Knight Templar, Dark Messiah, Well Intentioned Extremist or other villain, however, that's not the case.

This evil architect plans to use the heart of an orphan, an Artifact Of Doom, steal the Cosmic Keystone, or unleash a world ending war or plague to destroy all resistance and bring about their Utopia. Emphasis on their. The evil architect is probably operating under the assumption that this wonderful new world has him at the top, free to exert a benevolent or iron-fisted regime as he will. Using logic Machiavelli himself would cringe at, they reason that any and every sacrifice is worth making for this greater good, and that the pursuit of this ideal puts the Well Intentioned in Well Intentioned Extremist. A great deal of drama can be derived from this — Are they willing to kill a friend for it? Will they put their vision where their mouth is and kill themselves if need be, or is there a line even they will not cross? Some are able to inspire incredible devotion in their followers precisely because their vision and conviction is such that they know they won't live to see the paradise they plan to bring about, or don't deserve to.

This can be seen as a subversion of myths where the Apocalypse will bring about paradise. Heroes will be faced with the conundrum that, while this plan can very well work, and the world may certainly be going to pot like the villain says, is it worth sacrificing billions? The Heroes invariably decide that genocide is not the answer, and it's better to fix what you have than throw it away. In more morally ambiguous situations, the "means" might not be catastrophically destructive, all it takes is a "small", inconsequential sacrifice to bring about utopia. Say, selling every third generation to aliens, the daily ritual slaughter of a dozen people, or the ever popular Lotus Eater Machine on a planetary scale? If it guarantees the happiness of billions, isn't it worth it?

If they succeed, the result is usually a Crapsack World.

Often utilizes some form of Aesoptinum, generally with the message "Peace and harmony isn't worth the loss of free will/emotion/our souls/whatnot".

Curiously, the first example of an Utopia in recorded literature — Plato's Republic — is an example of this trope played absolutely straight and not as means for the opposite Aesop. Plato argues that the establishment and survival of the perfect state requires a "noble lie" that the citizens must be taught to induce them to love the state unconditionally.

Examples:

Comic Books

Rasputin in Hellboy. Mike Mignola even said that, as a writer, he can't fathom writing someone inherently evil, so gave Rasputin an ultimately good goal that would nonetheless bring about the end of the world.
In Watchmen, Ozymandias actually succeeds! However, whether it stays that way will depend on whether anyone reads and decides to seriously examine Rorschach's evidence against him...
Ra's al Ghul and the Order of St. Dumas in the various Batman series.
In DC Comics's Zero Hour, ex-Green Lantern Hal Jordan (embarking upon his Dork Age) tried to remake all of space and time to his liking.
The Myth Arc of Joe Kelly's Deadpool run involved the main character — a Screwy Squirrel Anti Hero — finding out that he was the "Mithras", prophesised to protect a being called "The Messiah", who would bring peace and prosperity to the world, from "Tiamat", who would destroy it. However, when said Messiah showed up, it turned out to be a being that froze everyone in the world in blissful mindlessness. Deadpool had to decide whether or not to fulfill his destiny and prevent all suffering at the price of free will. In the end, he decided to Screw Destiny and destroy the Messiah himself.
In Runaways, the Knight Templar Parents are trying to achieve paradise for their children. Not children as in the entire next generation of humanity — they'll kill everyone to achieve paradise for the six children they have between them.
A prime candidate for this trope: Magneto from the X-Men (comics, animated and movies), who is sometimes willing to kill all "normals" to create utopia for the mutants.
We are The Authority. Behave.

Anime

You could make a drinking game out of how many times Lucemon from Digimon states that he wishes to create a utopia through the destruction of both digital and real worlds.
The Z-Master from Gao Gai Gar wanted to save people from the despair and sadness of reality by mechanizing the universe, so that everyone could be happy forever.
Two cult leaders in Yu-Gi-Oh.
- Well, one of them was in GX. And Rex Godwin from 5D's has arguably achieved this goal already by forcing all uncouth individuals to live in a slum under Domino City.
The Dragons in X1999.
Light Yagami, aka "Kira", in Death Note, who wants to make a world without crime or sin with him as its god. Notable in that he's actually the main character.
The free world envisioned by Lelouch vi Britannia, aka "Zero", in Code Geass. Another main character.
- The ultimate goal of Charles, Marianne and V.V. from the same show was very similar to SEELE's Human Instrumentality Project, even down to the destruction of cities, the torment and deaths of countless people and so on. Except unlike The Human Instrumentality Project, there is no option of refusing it.
  - The intent of Lelouch's big brother, Schneizel seems to be yet another variation of this trope; his plan is apparently to enforce "peace" through widespread destruction, raining nuclear annihilation down upon the governments of the world from his massive flying fortress until the people acknowledge him as their "God" and end all conflict.
  - This all meaning that Lelouch is a good guy even though he is leaning more and more towards the Villain Corner.
SEELE's ultimate goal in Neon Genesis Evangelion is the Instrumentality Project, which will destroy the distinction between individual humans, but leave humanity around, so no one will ever be hurt and alone again. And if some kids need to be tortured, a few cities destroyed and a lot of soldiers have to die to make it happen, well it's just people's lives, not anything important.
SEARRS in Mai-HiME was willing to level down Fuka Academy and kill all the HiME to win the HiME carnival and achieve the "Golden Millennium". All right, it's one lousy school, who cares about that? (Not to mention that Alyssa was "Valkyrie No. 143" and the only success in what was presumably a long series of People Jars. What happened to her failed predecessors is left to the viewers' imagination.)
The real Big Bad of ROD the TV, namely Joker and the British Library.
Knives, the Big Bad of Trigun, might as well be the textbook example of this. His motto in the anime is "kill the spiders to save the butterflies". Oh, and all human beings are the spiders; only he and his brother count as butterflies. Lampshaded in his vociferations of "WE WILL HAVE. OUR. EDEN!".
- He gets much more backstory and Character Development in the manga and he has more interesting and 'altruistic' motivations, namely freeing his whole species. It's just a bit unfortunate that he does so by attempting genocide on the whole human race, which makes him both a kind of Spartacus figure on steroids and a crystal-clear Hitler figure with much more Aryanism and sociopathy than the original..... Which serves to remind us that human conflicts get polarized more often than not and that one's side's 'terrorists' are often the other side's 'freedom fighters'.
  - Also note that in the anime, he doesn't seem to have second thoughts about getting the plant on Sensei's ship killed (by his human evil minions!!) while in the manga, he is tormented by guilt at killing many plants as well in the Big Fall.
The ultimate goal of the Claw in Gun X Sword is the "Time of Happiness", where he will use Saudade to overwrite the minds of all living creatures with copies of his own; with all of humanity in utter agreement, war and strife will vanish. The process will kill him, but as he's dying of a terminal disease anyway, he sees it as a Heroic Sacrifice.
Kaede Kunikida, Momiji's twin sister, from Blue Seed. Okay, returning the Japan to its natural -- green and unpolluted -- state sounds like a good idea. Getting rid of wars and hatred is even better. The way to achieve these goals? Basically, turning people into plants. Thankfully, Momiji manages to convince Kaede that hope still exists in this world, and that it's something worth sacrificing one's life for.
Director Kakuzawa from Elfen Lied wants to destroy the human race and produce more Diclonii using Lucy, the only fertile female Diclonus, to replace them. He doesn't want to do this for any moral reason, though, but only so that in 100 or 200 years he can be worshipped as the god of the new species.
Depending upon your interpretation, Crystal Tokyo. Fanon just loves to do crossovers where Sailor Pluto is the villain due to her Omniscient Morality License.
In the Naruto movie Legend of the Stone of Gelel, Master Haido frequently speaks of creating a Utopia without war. In facts, he speaks of it frequently enough to make the audience suspicious; in the end, it turns out that Haido is a power hungry Big Bad, and his talk of peace was just a smokescreen.
- In the actual manga Pain plans to end all war. He wants to achieve this by harnessing the power of the tailed beasts to make a weapon of mass destruction that could destroy and entire country. If a war was started with one side lacking ninja, they would turn to Akatsuki, who would wipe out the entire opposing nation. After this, most countries would be to scared to start a war.

Western Animation

As the page quote shows, the Justice Lords do this in a couple episodes of Justice League. Most of the ends seem well worth the means, especially violating Lex Luthor's Joker Immunity and lobotomizing Omnicidal Maniacs, but the group quickly leap off the slippery slope by getting rid of the right to vote or speak freely while arresting individuals for threatening to not pay for food.
The city of Ba Sing Se in AvatarTheLastAirbender, when at last it is reached, is a stronghold that has withstood the Fire Nation for one hundred years, a haven for thousands of refugees. However, the price for this is the censorship, even from the king, that there is a war that has been waging for the past 100 years, that the Earth Kingdom is losing. As well, all who say that there ''is'' a war are promptly and quietly kidnapped, brainwashed, and enslaved by the Dai Li militia.
- Fire Lord Sozin once claimed he was starting the war and wants to Take Over The World to "share our prosperity with the rest of the world", and this is apparently what the nation is at large taught. However, there's a good chance he was lying.

Film

Hugo Drax, a James Bond villain in Moonraker.
- Also Karl Stromberg in The Spy Who Loved Me.
Dr. Cocteau in Demolition Man is a "mild" version of this. He actually helps rebuild a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles into a beautiful, prosperous, violence-neutered Utopia. Though he did work a miracle, he exiled thousands who refused to conform to his "Perfect Pearl" vision and wanted to live unhealthy, violent, free lives. Ultimately, his homogeneous city is exposed to violence and change due to his own stupidity.
The Village is ostensibly a period drama about a primitive town's struggle with dark magical forces. In actuality, the town is on a modern nature preserve. Its adult inhabitants have fled there to set up a simple way of life which they hope will be free from senseless violence. Like most utopian experiments, this one fails miserably (at least in principle) when one of the town's children tries to murder another in a fit of jealousy. One could reasonably argue that the fear-based "conditioning" the children were put through was more traumatizing to them than growing up in a modern society would have been.
The Operative in Serenity calmly commits atrocity after atrocity because he believes he's helping to create "a better world." Perhaps a semi-subversion, in that he does not intend to be a leader in his new world — he knows that what he does is evil, and that there will be no place for him in the better world.
- Also, it is discovered that the Alliance government attempted to develop a drug to dampen people's violent impulses. It didn't work (most of the population they tested it on became totally apathetic and literally lay down and died; a few became the psychotic "Reavers"). Even if it had worked as desired, there would still be the issue of the Alliance's apparent plan to involuntarily dose people with the stuff....
- This troper finds it a bit of a Wall Banger that they apparently decided to dose an *entire planet* with an untested drug. That also makes it into a bit of an Broken Aesop that messing with human nature is bad (the intended message I presume), as it relies on the Alliance being insanely incompetent.
The entire premise of the movie Equilibrium is a utopian future society created by suppressing all human emotion and anything that might stir it up — through propaganda, chemicals, and Gun Kata-practicing Badass Longcoats.
In Final Fantasy VII Advent Children, Sephiroth claims that his new goal is to use the thoughts of those who died from geostigma to take control of the lifestream and send the planet on a journey through space to find a new planet, where he'll build a "bright and shining future." This gets streamlined in the videogame sequel Dirge of Cerberus, in which the main villain wishes to go off into space with the lifestream itself to rule over a restarted world.
The goal of the Neighbourhood Watch Alliance in Hot Fuzz is Utopia Justifies The Means on a small scale, in their quest to win the Best Village Award at all costs.
In Constantine, the Big Bad Gabriel plans to release Mammon (the son of the Devil) onto the Earth to bring pain and horror, in order to purify mankind and make it worthy of God's love.
In "Star Wars Episode III", Sith Lord Palpatine states that once he rules the galaxy, there will be peace.

Live Action TV

Star Trek, The Borg. They genuinely wish to understand all lifeforms and establish peace, but people want to be individuals.
- The same could be said about the Dominion, they want to unite everyone and bring "Order" to the galaxy, the Idea of cultures that aren't part of each other regardless of ally/neutral stances makes them "chaotic" by default, likely due to the Changelings point of view based on the great link, which is simultaneously more collective but more individual than the Borg.
- A word and a number: Section 31.
Jasmine in Angel genuinely wanted to help humanity, and used her godhood to engineer her return to Earth as a beatific, mind-numbingly beautiful goddess. Though she unified all who saw her (or heard her voice) and ended conflict, that much power required "volunteers" to be eaten by draining their life force, on a daily basis. If successful, she would have essentially made everyone into peaceful, Jasmine-loving zombies, and also have eaten thousands of people per year, but destroyed all evil in the world (except herself).
Linderman, on Heroes wants to allow New York City to be destroyed by an atomic explosion, ostensibly to unite the world and grant it hope... however, it is never explained exactly why he expects this as an outcome. This may be a Shout Out to Watchmen.
- And let's not forget Adam Monroe, who wants to "fix" the world by releasing a virus that will kill over 90% of the population. Apparently he thinks this will end wars and discrimination and...well anything. And of course when the dust settles and the survivors look around, he, immortal Adam Monroe, will be there to lead them and become emperor over all. Or something.
The Avatars in Charmed wanted to create a world without conflict. It turned out maintaining it involved the deletion of anyone whose violent tendencies survived their spell.
The PsiCop Alfred Bester from Babylon 5, who grew up as a orphan baby in the Psi Corps and is willing to kill or mind-control any non-telepath in his way if it furthers his goal of saving human telepaths and other psychics from hate-crimes and discrimination and ultimately helps achieve his dream of giving the telepathic "homo superior" dominance over the nonmutants. On the other hand, he is curiously hesitant to kill a telepath even if said telepath opposes him (instead he tries to persuade them to change their views, or if that doesn't work, tries to capture them and ships them to Psi Corps "re-education" camps). Considering that during the series telepaths are abused and enslaved both by the Psi Corps and the Shadows, and Garibaldi uncovers a conspiracy by an anti-mutant group to infect all human telepaths with a deadly virus so that they would either have to take daily injections of medication (also manufactured by the same corporation) and be easily controllable that way, or die in agony, Bester's paranoia can be seen as simple pre-emptive self-defence.
- The afore-mentioned conspiracy discovered by Garibaldi is also a case of this.
- Except for the gleeful delight he takes in tormenting Mundanes, and the casualness which with he kills them.
The Scientific Reform Society in the Doctor Who story Robot planned to trigger a worldwide nuclear holocause unless the nations agreed to yield power to them.

Video Games

The bonus material for Halo 3 describe the Flood as a theoretical utopia, where if everybody joined the Flood, there would be no more violence, war, poverty, hatred, etc. Unfrtunately the means by which it does this is by assimilating all life and rendering them into zombie-like forms.
Lord Yggdrasil in Tales Of Symphonia wants to create a world where everyone is a soulless shell, so there would be no more discrimination. But mainly he just wanted to resurrect his dead sister.
- Common theme in Tales Series games. Pops up again in Tales Of The Abyss in which the Big Bad seeks to kill everyone on the planet and replace them with clones in an attempt to Screw Destiny.
  - What makes the Tales of The Abyss example weird is that the guy was willing use many of the clones created as pawns, cast them aside, and tell them they were just mere tools to add insult to injury.
This turns out to be the main villain's motivation in the first Shadow Hearts. Notably, he actually only decided to take extreme measures after his less extreme attempt failed catastrophically, leading to him being tried and imprisoned as a heretic several centuries prior to the game.
In Bioshock, the player learns that Andrew Ryan, creator of the pseudo-Objectivist undersea utopia Rapture, wound up Jumping Off The Slippery Slope and turning into a totalitarian ruler in his efforts to eliminate his ruthless rival, Frank Fontaine.
The Hero in the Soul Blazer series of games (Soul Blazer, Illusion Of Gaia and Terranigma) is doomed to create the modern, industrial world during the process of his quest (or in Soul Blazer's case, free generally evil people), regardless of how much affection he or others may have for their fantasy world.
Count Bleck from Super Paper Mario would fit this trope perfectly if it didn't turn out that he was just a Nietzsche Wannabe instead, just wanting to destroy everythign without recreating it and LYING about it by telling his minions that he was going to recreate the universe as a utopia. Dimentio from the same game, on the other hand, fits it perfectly, even betraying Count Bleck to destroy all world and remake them himself when he finds out that Bleck is lying.
This is pretty much the entire premise of the Messian Church in the Shin Megami Tensei series, and of their patron deity Himself. It only becomes more prominent as the series goes on, from Shin Megami Tensei to SMT II to SMT: Nocturne.
Sakaki of .hack//G.U tried using the AIDA virus to make a world where everyone would get along.
Darth Revan in Knights Of The Old Republic — it's revealed in the second game that he became a Sith Lord at least partly in the best interests of justice and order in the galaxy. Then again, this seems to be a common self-justification and/or recruiting gimmick among Sith Lords, Revan is simply one of the very few who actually tried.
The goal of the Order of the Sword in Devil May Cry 4 is to use the denizens of the Demon World to destroy the Human World so that they can bring about Sanctus's version of Utopia.
The Big Bad of Ar Tonelico, Mir, is after a utopia in which Reyvateils, artificially-created magical song maidens, will live free from slavery and mistreatment. In order to achieve this, she seeks to destroy all humans, having pegged them pretty firmly as irredeemable monsters due to her own traumatic history as a Tykebomb. The fact that she names this utopia "Reyvateilia" goes some way towards exemplifying the fact that she's pretty much just a terrified, idealistic child inside.
A theme of the Metal Gear series, is "Outer Heaven," Big Boss' ideal of a world where soldiers would always have a place free from political manipulation; played almost straight in Metal Gear Solid (where Liquid Snake takes up the mantle), reworked in Metal Gear Solid 2 (where Solidus' ideal is not soldiers but rather America/liberty), conceived in Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops (Army's Heaven was a less-than-sincere idea but had the basic concept down), and then nastily subverted in Metal Gear Solid 4, where war has become business, the world becoming a place where soldiers will 'always' be needed, but with none of the ideals behind Big Boss' vision.

Web Animation

The Big Bad in the online Flash series Broken Saints tricks the US government and military into creating the instruments which they think will allow them to set up their version of Utopia. Instead, said instruments will actually trigger the Government Conspiracy's own destruction and set up the Big Bad's version of Utopia. (The heroes somehow manage to step in at the last minute, stop both factions, and use the living Empathic Weapon the Big Bad created to set up their own version of Utopia.)

Web Comics

In [1]: Oracle For Hire, Celesto Morgan — a seer who has become the Champion of Chaos — fiercely believes in this. Having been on the rough end of humanity a bit too often, he believes that "When an infection is too deep... amputation is the only solution."
Redcloak, the Goblin cleric from Order Of The Stick, has the goal of creating a world where goblins and goblinoids are not simply farms for XP. He's got two ways of doing this. The first is that he and Xykon establish control over the gate and the snarl, ruling the world and allowing the Dark One (the god of the goblins) to blackmail the other gods into doing what it wants. The second involves the snarl being released and destroying the entire multiverse, eating the souls of everyone and anyone in any of the planes, including the afterlife. The gods will be forced to recreate the world, but the Dark One will now have a say in how the world is made.

Literature

The main character of Perfume envisions a world where everyone bows to his god-like sense of smell, and he's willing to kill anyone he has to without remorse to get it. He is on the verge of succeeding when he gets a taste of what it would be like, and decides that it's not what he wanted after all.
The One Ring in The Lord Of The Rings offers everyone who comes near it a vision of a world bowing to them as a great and mighty lord. The hobbits resist its effects solely due to their humility.
- Admittedly, if you were smaller than even your average dwarf. you would probably find it hard to see yourself as some kind of Evil Overlord as well.
The Alternate History novel Pavane concerns an alternate England ruled by the Inquisition, which is ultimately revealed to have slowed down technological advances so to avoid the Holocaust and other calamities of this world (how they knew about this is less clear).
In Watership Down, the rabbit protagonists are invited to join a pleasant warren, with abundant food readily available from a nearby garden that is never guarded. The natives of this Lapine utopia have seemingly evolved beyond merely struggling for survival, and delve into art and poetry, as would be expected from a culture of peace and prosperity. But gentle mystic Fiver gets bad vibes and won't enter the warren, and the others discover almost too late that the farmer provides the garden to fatten up the rabbits and make them less wary, and he "harvests" them whenever he wants something for his stewpot. Rather than leave such bounty, the inhabitants have developed a social code that never asks where someone is — because they just might be strangling to death in a snare.
Fahrenheit 451 is a classic example, where a utopia is created by banning books, funerals, weddings, and just about anything that causes an emotional reaction.
Ursula K. Le Guin examines this issue in at least two of her stories. Both The Lathe of Heaven and The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas examine the costs and pitfalls of possible utopias.
Played heroically by Joe Haldeman's Forever Peace, where his main characters discover that a project to recreate and study the early Big Bang will, well... cause a new Big Bang. Given that humanity now has the means to wipe out the universe, the heroes decide to force the war-torn near-future Earth into peace by forcibly implanting neural jacks into key figures in the multinational military, and then hooking them up to each other and many others to force empathy and the inability to kill (directly or indirectly) on them, and then eventually on to humanity at large. The final death toll of their project is actually quite small, and much favorable compared to the alternative.
Emhyr var Emreis, Emperor of Nilfgaard, one of the main antagonists (sort of) in Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher cycle, reveals at the culmination of the last book that, according to an ancient prophecy, he and he alone might save the world from a slow, freezing death by having a child with his likewise-prophesied daughter (who also happens to be one of the main characters and the titular Witcher Geralt's adopted daughter, more or less). The son of that child will come to rule the entire world - and save it from destruction. Aside from incest, the plan also involved killing witnesses and starting the medieval fantasy version of World War Two, but all that was quite secondary. Geralt replied that a world that has to be saved in such a way isn't worth saving, and eventually shamed Emhyr into abandoning the plan and letting his daughter go. It is all but outright stated that in doing so he irrevocably doomed the world, though it still has three thousand years to go.
In Lois Lowry's The Giver, the titular character and Jonas, his apprentice, often discuss whether their peaceful and happy lives ordained by the Community is worth the loss of choice, of family, the loss of sexuality, color and music, and if it's worth the execution of anyone who transgresses against the rules even accidentally, and of any extra baby that would disrupt the population count.
In Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End, humanity's fast technological progress gives minor hate groups the ability to bring destruction at a large scale. Humanity is on the brink of annihilation, or a singularity. The antagonist plans to use YouGottaBelieveMe technology to bring about some adult supervision. The same author doesn't seem to have much trust in the near future; a similar kind of supervision appears as the PeaceAuthority, in the Across Realtime trilogy.
In the Isaac Asimov novel The End of Eternity, an entire corps of time-traveling guardians ensure humanity's peaceful, prosperous existence... at the cost of losing creative individuals and locking mankind on Earth, which it turns out will cause humanity to wither and die out as an evolutionary dead end when younger, more ambitious alien societies quickly overtake it in technology and take over all other inhabitable worlds before humans realize that it might be a good idea to move on.
- And far later, his Robots/Empire/Foundation series arguably ended up proposing no less than three possible means towards utopia - the First and Second Foundations, devoted to taking over the world through sheer technological sophistation and manipulation vs. telepathy and mathematics (both of which are intended to lead to a lasting and peaceful new Galactic Empire), and "Gaia", a proposal that would involve stripping many lifeforms, including humanity, of most of their individuality and rebelliousness. An entire book is devoted to figuring out which of the three is the most desirable, but while the rather interesting choice of Gaia is somewhat teasingly ominous, seen as a necessary evil almost, despite having a logical reason behind it, we'll pretty much never actually really know how it it was officially intended to work out for humanity, thanks to Dr. Asimov's rather untimely death and subsequent inability to write another book for the series.
In the Sword Of Truth series, Emperor Jagang believes that conquering the entire world and killing everyone with magic will sever the connection the Creator and Keeper have with it, allowing mankind alone to advance into a new golden age. He also believes that everyone should be exactly equal and all who have any special talents should be punished for it.
In Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series, everyone is beautiful and happy. There's no war and no poverty. The surgery that makes everyone pretty also gives them brain lesions eliminating anger and sadness, but also creativity and independence.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley also does a good job of showing this trope, by creating a sort of mindless utopia where that revolves around sex, drugs, and the mass production of humans to fit into certain roles in society.

Real Life

A depressingly long list including (but not limited to) Pol Pot, Mao, Lenin, Robespierre, Castro...

Tabletop Games

Warhammer 40000: The Imperium of Man gave up on achieving a utopia after a galaxy-shattering civil war that resulted in a Church Militant that puts the emphasis on the "Militant" taking over, but the Tau, who do pretty much everything "For the Greater Good!", are a utopia (or so they claim) with an aggressive foreign policy and a fondness for orbital bombardments, sterilization, and concentration camps.

Music

Ska band Five Iron Frenzy mocked this attitude in their song "My Evil Plan to Save the World."

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