“Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.”
That essay contains the phrase, “the stinking Yahoos”.
Priceless.
The OP asks what a Utopia would look like. Here’s one opinion:
There’s a lake of gin
We can both jump in
And the handouts grow on bushes
In the new-mown hay
We can sleep all day
And the bars all have free lunches
Where the mail train stops
And there ain’t no cops
And the folks are tender-hearted
Where you never change your socks
And you never throw rocks
And your hair is never parted
Oh the buzzin’ of the bees in the cigarette trees
The soda water fountain where the lemonade springs
And the bluebird sings in that Big Rock Candy Mountain
See also Cockaigne. (No, it’s not something you snort.)
The reason that Utopia is impossible is that our wishes represent a partial ordering.
(This has already been alluded to in this thread by several people.) Utopian perfection implies maximizing a bunch of characteristics of the society, but many cannot be compared across people.
Person A wants to maximize sexual freedom. Person B wants to maximize sexual morality according to some religion. How is any society going to be perfect for both?
The only way is to get rid of one of these - which is why any Utopian society, I contend, will soon turn totalitarian.
If Persons C through Z want to maximize murder, that will take car of many personality conflicts that would otherwise be troublesome.