Does Utopia justify the means?

Depends on the utopia, and on the means. Taxation, despite being non-consensual, is to me pretty clearly on the justified side, while say killing the disabled is far, far out on the unjustified side. Drawing the line however is the trick.

Anyone out to create a utopia will invariably have to force it on others and they will be forced to use violence eventually even if they don't plan to use it from the onset. This results in groups like the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, the Red Guards, the Nazis, the Khmer Rogue and the Islamic State (among countless others) killing thousands of innocent people in the name of purifying society and humanity.

You can't force society and people to change without the end result being a bloodbath. And your utopia usually just implodes on top of the mountain of corpses it was built on.

edited 6th Sep '14 2:29:16 PM by Rationalinsanity

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

Of course you can. We live in a society built on forcing people to change through laws and the threat of backing them up with force. You just can't force people to change too much, too fast.

The difference between evolution and revolution seems to be the tipping point

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

Revolution can only be judged as "right" in hindsight, I think. If it had a noble goal, and the end result left the world a better place, then ultimately the revolution was good. Also, I dislike the cliche that "the ends justify the means" because the means are a part of the end. All the results of a change, positive and negative, have to be accounted for before we as amateur armchair historians decide whether that change is good or bad.

I, of course, generally dislike the idea of any revolution that I'm not personally in complete control of, because I don't trust anyone else to lead a revolution that will change the world for the better by my standards. Likewise, most of you would probably I rather not get that unstoppable robot army I've been asking Santa for for a while now. Though when he does bring it, I'll have plenty of fuel ready!

I think it is impossible for us humans to make a utopia, so I consider the question rather pointless. I consider a utopia as a paradise with no suffering, no aging or death, a perfect and unchanging moral code adhered to by everyone, and no written law code because everyone would naturally do the right thing.

People imagine all kinds of things that would make the world a better place, and some of those things even came to be, but it doesn't even matter whether they would work or not. No how well-off people are, people will never be satisfied, because humans are fundamentally irrational.

But for all that, progress still happens. It's always a painful process, often bloody and violent. Since that always happens regardless, I'd say it's worth it. Gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet.

Yeah, true utopia is impossible, but every little bit of progress is still worth fighting to death for.

But as far as utopia being a motive for fictional villains, I think it's legit. As long it's not blatantly stupid, I can usually sympathize, even with more bizarre evil plans like Instrumentality.

Basically Shin Megami Tensei II Law ending?

---

This thread can still be used?

Watch me destroying my country

We're it not that tvtropes doesn't allow that kind of shitposting, I'd have throw down the thread necromancer magic card.

edited 4th May '16 4:10:39 PM by CaptainCapsase

problem with Utopia Justifies The Means is quite simply... it often doesn't end with Utopia, look at one of the most popular examples, Warhammer 40k, the Emperor of Mankind was very much into Utopia Justifies the Means, that was the point of suppressing religion and encourage logic, reason, science (and galaxy conquest), to make humanity better, stronger, happier... and epically failed, the "means" came back to bite him, and humanity descended into a fascist wet dream, I feel that is the likely ending for any real attempt at the trope...

edited 4th May '16 4:17:31 PM by FieldMarshalFry

advancing the front into TV Tropes

Depends on how we define utopia. In the case of a Mary Suetopia, even having to justify means would render it not technically a utopia. However, if we think of a utopia as simply the author's ideal society then it's simply one that makes the right trade offs.

As for it being an excuse motive: potentially, but I'd argue that it's actually fairly plausible. Most evil regimes and terrorists in real-life justify their actions on the basis of a hypothetical utopia in the future. I'd argue it's a bit more interesting if they have already begun to build their "utopia" rather than just kill people to make one. For example, like Brave New World.

In the game I'm making, the villains are the leaders of The Empire which they consider a utopia and want to "reform" the galaxy. On paper, their society can sound like a utopia but actually isn't (for example, there's no money in their society...because all property is owned by the state who rents it out to people based on how loyal they are).

I think the Imperium is one of the most darkly hilarious deconstructions of "humanity sets aside its differences to fight against a common foe" ever conceived.

edited 4th May '16 4:26:56 PM by Protagonist506

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

did we even do that? Empy just bitch slapped everyone into submission and then we started worshipping him... and killing everyone who didn't...

advancing the front into TV Tropes

Man, who would launch a thread on such an insipid-

-looks at the OP-

....Oh.

Well, my current viewpoint is that utopia is, well, just that: a place that can never exist. So nothing really justifies utopia simply because it's not an actual thing.

I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.

I mean, part of the problem is that we define utopia rather narrowly. It's specifically a perfect society.

I'd argue a better definition would be "opposite of dystopia". A dystopia is a villainous or generally negatively portrayed society-a Villain World, if you will. It does not necessarily mean the worst regime possible, and some dystopias are much worse than others. The Community is a dystopia by most definitions, but it's WH 40 K expy (the Tau) comes across as jarringly Utopian by comparison to the Imperium of Man.

So, I'd argue we might consider redefining Utopia as an "Especially just and idealized society. A place the author wants us to think would be an awesome place to live", not necessarily absolutely perfect.

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"