Those who believe that Utopia Justifies the Means in Literature.
- In the Age of Fire series, this is a goal shared by both the Wyrmmaster and the Copper. However, in both cases, their idea of "utopia" is colored by their prejudices — the Wyrmmaster wants to wipe out the non-human races in order to "free" humans from their "oppression", while the Copper wants to establish dragon domination of the world, not caring what the expense is to the other races.
- Damian Cray from the Alex Rider series thinks that most of the problems in the world are caused by drugs. So he kills a few people who get in his way, a person who just badmouths him, steals Air Force One, and tries to launch nukes at major drug-running countries.
- Brave New World does a good job of showing this trope, by creating a sort of mindless utopia which revolves around sex, drugs, and the mass production of humans to fit into certain roles in society. World Controller Mustapha Mond sees the flaws in the society he runs, but thinks the downsides are worth it to maintain a utopia where everyone is happy.
- In The Calling, the Architect (and later on, Utha as well) plans to stop future Blights and bring peace between darkspawn and the other species by spreading the Taint so that essentially everyone has go through the Joining, which many would not survive.
- In Christian Nation, this is the motivation behind the eventual creation of the American theocracy by the Sarah Palin and Steve Jordan administrations — to prepare the United States for the Lord's Second Coming.
- The Chronicles of Dorsa: Brother Rennus, convinced by the deathless king that his realm is a utopia where no one dies and everyone lives in peace together, joins his side while recruiting more Brothers to the cause as well. After this, he tries to murder Tasia repeatedly, committing treason by doing so, and aids the mountain men's attacks, which kill many more Imperial soldiers with the goal of the deathless king ultimately conquering the world as they believe that this utopia will be spread over everything when that happens.
- In Chung Kuo, this is a common view among both defenders and rebels in the City, although it was not all-pervasive.
- The Culture:
- This is the perennial mantra of the Special Circumstances division. According to them, they're making other civilizations better (i.e., more Culture-like), and you can ignore the assassinations, revolutions, and occasional bloody wars they cause to do it because they can statistically prove that it's all worth it... to three decimal places, if you'd like.
- In Look to Windward, Hub suggests that the unidentified Involveds backing the Chelgrian plot to kill fifty billion culturists were internal elements, determined to ginger up the Culture by any means necessary.
- In the book "The Czar of Love and Techno", one of the main characters who is a censor during the Stalinist Regime very much believes in this trope. He fully believes his work of erasing "Dissidents" is for the greater good and in service of a grand revolution. He believes this even when he ends up being falsely arrested, and is coached in prison to say he is a dissident. While pretending to be a dissident, he ends up almost naming this trope: "Because the future is a lie with which we justify the brutality of the present."
- In Daemon, it is revealed that this is Matthew Sobol's goal in writing the Daemon. His plans are to tear down the society that currently exists, ultimately causing global economic and social chaos and forcing the issue on those who didn't join his efforts willingly. In the end, however, it appears that his actions are justified. While not a Utopia, the beginning of what appears to be a truly better society is formed. To be fair, Sobel and his Daemon didn't cause the economic and social chaos, he just saw it coming and used the Daemon to prepare people for it. Well, the Daemon might have contributed slightly with the whole corn thing.
- The plot of Darkness at Noon centers around Rubashov, a veteran Communist who gets arrested during the Great Purge. While in captivity, he reflects on all the people he's betrayed and horrible things he's done in the name of building a Utopia, while contrasting it with the reality of the Crapsack World he's actually helped to create. Rubashov has also grown disillusioned with the idea that the Revolution will pave the way to a socialist Utopia, but Gletkin, his interrogator believes that there will be one in a hundred years or so if desperate measures are taken now. Rubashov remains unconvinced, and awaits his execution with the thought that "one cannot build Paradise with concrete."
- David from Divergent. All he wants is for humanity to return back to their natural state, which is done by having more genetically pure children born from genetically damaged families inside the walled cities. Yet he's willing to take away the free will of hundreds and thousands of people, many times over, just to achieve it.
- The Draka: Tom Cairstens' motivation for collaborating with Gwendolyn Ingolfssen in Drakon might be described as Ecotopia Justifies the Means. If her plan succeeds, there will be no more extinctions (except, technically, that of the human race.)
- In The End of Eternity, a 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 may be a good idea to move on.
- Played heroically by Joe Haldeman's Forever Peace when the 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 it is much more favorable compared to the alternative.
- The 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 superiority and manipulation vs. telepathy and prescient 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 much of their individuality and rebelliousness. A 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 never actually really know how it was officially intended to work out for humanity, as Isaac Asimov couldn't himself decide, and instead spent his last years writing two prequels detailing the life of Hari Seldon. Addressed in one of the prequels by David Brin, whereby it turns out to be a 27, the Knight Templar placed by Daneel to placate various factions. A brief paragraph at the start of one of the prequel novels alludes to a very interesting solution — the Gaia aspect is incorporated, along with galaxy-shared Second Foundation group-knowledge with a helping of the First Foundation's scientific view.
- The Giver and Jonas, his apprentice, often discuss whether their peaceful and happy lives ordained by the Community is worth the loss of choice, family, sexuality, color, and music, and if it's worth the "release" (that is, execution) of anyone who transgresses against the rules, even accidentally, and any extra babies that would disrupt the population count.
- In the Backstory of the Green-Sky Trilogy, the pair of scientists who fled Earth with a boatload of war orphans to form the peaceful new world of Green-Sky have a falling out as their charges start coming of age. Neshom argues that the "Kindar" should learn about the horrors they came from. Wissen argues that the only way to prevent the tragedy they fled is to never let the Kindar know of such things and to all but banish the concepts leading to violence from society. Neshom ends up dead, and his followers banished underground. It's implied that Wissen murdered his colleague.
- In "Harrison Bergeron", egalitarianism is enforced by handicapping the more intelligent, athletic, or beautiful members of society down to the level of the lowest common endowment. If you still happen to be able to destroy your handicaps... you'll be shot dead.
- Harry Potter:
- Attempted by Gellert Grindelwald. Gellert believed that Muggles, left to their own devices, were too dangerous and needed to be guided or outright controlled by the wiser magical people. His use of dark magic and the atrocities he committed, even his apparent affiliation with Hitler, were all dismissed with one phrase: "For the greater good".
- Some fanfic writers attribute a more cunning and under-handed version of this to Dumbledore, with him either planning to sacrifice Harry "for the greater good" or molding him into the perfect leader to create the future Dumbledore had planned out. Considering revelations in the seventh book, it's not a difficult leap in reasoning, though he did that after he learned that Harry was protected by his mother's blood and his vision for the future world was primarily one without the Death Eaters reign of terror.
- In Heaven by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, the religion of Cosmic Unity was born from the idea that since interplanetary warfare would be so destructive, all planets and people must join together in harmony. Since such warfare must obviously be avoided at all costs, everyone who doesn't agree with the idea of joining the church is subject to being attacked and utterly annihilated by them. The virtual Heaven they offer their members is also questionable, though in that case, this trope is subverted in that as soon as its custodians encounter a single being who doesn't want to live in it after experiencing it, which they imagined impossible, they begin to dismantle the system.
- His Dark Materials: In Northern Lights/The Golden Compass, Lord Asriel is willing to kill Lyra's best friend in order to make a portal and gather an army to fight the Authority. The closest he comes to reconsidering is when Lyra shows up and he thinks that fate has sent him his own child in answer to his summons.
- The ultimate goal of the Mesan Alignment in Honor Harrington is the ultimate perfection of the human species — although they still plan on having a vast slave underclass (they are the bad guys, after all).
- In The Host (2008), the aliens who come to Earth make it a lovely, peaceful land of curiosity and intelligence... by taking over the bodies of all the humans and effectively killing them. A point is made in the story that the younger a human is the easier it is to take them over, which means anyone who didn't have the age/willpower to fight back had their minds and individuality destroyed so silver worms could hijack their bodies.
- In the Jackelian Series, there once was a Utopia called Camlantis that faded into legend after being overthrown by barbarian hordes. Abraham Quest and Robur seek to rediscover and re-establish this Utopia, and to make sure that it doesn't fall again by wiping out every other nation, human or otherwise, on Earth.
- In the short story "Join Our Gang"
, the Sirian Combine is going to have a peaceful and economically flourishing galaxy — and if your planet doesn't agree to play nice and sign up, they'll use their incredible knowledge of biological and genetic engineering to make you agree. One of the things they do is increase birthrate in animals. They did this to, among others, rats on Earth, and two generations later borrowed the great white shark to bring another planet to heel. - Journey to Chaos: Nunnal Enaz wants to cure mana mutation victims, mend the relations between elves and mortals, put an end to the elven slave trade, weaken Order's power in Tariatla and make sure Order can never ever threaten her home village. To do this, she risks the safety of her home village, the freedom of her family, and her own life on The Bet with Order.
- The Lathe of Heaven examines the costs and pitfalls of possible utopias; Haber creates a world state that regulates every aspect of people's lives, among other things.
- Nicolae Carpathia's goal of a peaceful united world under one government in the Left Behind book series requires using police state methods to achieve. It's also the basis for everything that God does in the book series itself.
- 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 (not necessarily a Utopian). Most hobbits are able to resist its effects solely due to their humility. The best it can offer Sam Gamgee is a vision of a huge garden with him ruling over all the other gardeners, which he promptly dismisses as absurd. Gandalf warns specifically against using the One Ring to fight Sauron and make a better world. Because it was made with all of Sauron's greed, malice and desire to corrupt and control it takes all selfish aspects of its Bearer and amplifies them, twisting even good desires into pride and despotism.
- Zack, the protagonist of The Mental State, uses ruthless and underhanded tactics to take over the running of the state prison. However, after doing so, he imposes more liberal rules on the inmates and staff. This improves the quality of life for the residents and results in a drop in re-offending rates. Even the other prison authorities are impressed and start applying some of the same changes to other prisons.
- The Neanderthal Parallax:
- Deconstructed; the reason behind the Neanderthals' sterilization policy has to do with the fact that they are, on the whole, very physically strong (hint: they routinely hunt mammoth using only wooden spears), and a simple dispute could easily end up with someone getting killed. (One major plot point in the first book involves one Neanderthal character being struck by another. The loser got his jaw essentially destroyed with one punch, and even that was a pulled punch; if the other party had taken a full swing and he hadn't pulled away, it would have been fatal.) It's stated that in the past, Neanderthal political assassinations were done by just walking up to the target and smashing their skull in. We later see this in action when the Neanderthal ambassador to Earth easily dispatches a human assassin with her bare hands. This is also probably why they never had many wars — it's stated in the books that the last one took place over 1600 years back, and even then, only 719 people were killed (which is apparently high, from the way they reflect on it).
- Also subverted in Hybrids, in that we see a weak link in the Neanderthal justice system: a case of domestic abuse which would normally be punishable by castration. Unfortunately, the woman refuses to press charges because she does not want to be responsible for sterilizing her children too, and only escapes by going to live on Human Earth, which obviously would not work for all Neanderthal abuse victims. It's a major flaw if the couple has children. Also, even this solution isn't a guarantee. Without access to her, the abusive man-mate could hurt someone else, this person could report him, and her children and any grandchildren would still be sterilised.
- The villains in the Dean Koontz novel Night Chills come up with an effective method of mind control through Subliminal Advertising and seek to make the world perfectly ordered, but their agent quickly succumbs to Power Perversion Potential when testing its effects on a small town.
- Completely inverted in Nineteen Eighty-Four: Winston thinks that the Party's original aim was to make a utopia where everyone is equal and happy, and it just happened to have Gone Horribly Wrong, but O'Brian corrects him and explains that creating a utopia was never the intention: they're just doing it for the power and suffering.
- "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" describes a utopian city that requires a young child to be in absolute suffering to function properly.
- 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 The Peace War, an organization calling itself the Peace Authority uses advanced technology to overthrow the world's governments and enforce a peaceful, low-tech lifestyle on the world. Some members of the Authority do genuinely believe that they're acting for the best and that the devastation they've caused along the way is justified, although others are simply in it for the opportunity to lord it over other people.
- In Rainbows End, humanity's fast technological progress gives minor hate groups the ability to bring destruction on a large scale. Humanity is on the brink of either annihilation or a singularity. The antagonist plans to use Mind Control technology to bring about some adult supervision.
- The villains of Rainbow Six want to wipe out large portions of humanity with an engineered virus so that the planet can be saved.
- In Running Out of Time, an Old West settlement is dying of a plague. One girl must brave the unknown to save the town. It turns out that her entire town is a tourist attraction, set up by idealists who disliked the modern world. Unfortunately, for the children born into the town, the few people who still believe in the town's original purpose force everyone to stay, and prohibit the parents from telling their kids, who begin dying like flies from diphtheria. Oh, and the plague is Phase One of an evil scheme to breed a super-race of children by exposing them to various diseases. The kids just have to survive them all.
- The island "where everything ends up" in the final book in A Series of Unfortunate Events has the leader, Ishmael, hiding many important documents from the islanders in the arboretum. He "doesn't force anyone to do anything", yet everyone agrees. Like Brave New World, the island's citizens' judgment constantly diminishes because they are always drinking cordial. Ish justifies this by insisting that there's "nothing wrong with sheltering people from the terrible dangers", and points out that the Baudelaire parents did the same thing.
- In the short story "Seventy Years of Decpop" by Philip José Farmer, a Mad Scientist releases a virus that renders a large portion of the Earth's population sterile. The story is told from the point of view of a baby food salesman who realizes that he's going to be out of a job soon, since most people won't be able to conceive children. This story was written in The '70s when overpopulation was a big concern, and the plot actually seems to succeed. With less people, quality of life improves, racial-oriented housing (upscale Whites versus ghetto Blacks) disappears, individualized teaching spreads in the schools, the Native American tribes start getting all their land back, and pollution decreases while more natural areas are preserved and enlarged. Fertile people become highly sought after and are put in a position of unprecedented influence (even shown in a situation where one woman who's fertile is a lesbian and agrees to artificial insemination only if she's allowed to legally wed her same-sex partner decades before this can be done in the real world). It's not perfect, because Humans Are Bastards, but it seems as close as we'll ever come to a utopia. The man responsible is never seen at all, so no one even knows if he himself survived, but he gradually is declared a Well-Intentioned Extremist.
- In The Spellsong Cycle by L.E. Modesitt Jr., the main character, who's canonically
Neutral Good, accumulates a five-digit body count by the end of the first book, because she's determined to fix the Crapsack World she's trapped in. Interestingly, she isn't aiming for utopia proper—she's trying to recreate the American democratic system, which is utopian compared to the society she's dealing with. - The final book of Spy High is a great example of this. The Big Bad in question is Jonathan Deveraux, the deceased founder of the Spy School whose personality has been uploaded onto a computer. Throughout the series, he gradually loses access to the "human" parts of his computerised psyche. As a result, he uses his vast resources to infiltrate computer systems all around the world, slipping nanomachines into everyday products. When activated, these nanomachines will turn people into emotionless zombies with no hatred or anger whatsoever. Using the pseudonym "The Deliverer", he activates it at a UN summit, turning all the UN ambassadors into zombies, and then turns the entire United Kingdom for much the same effect. Needless to say, this causes global panic.Lori: He's going to establish Utopia, a perfect — no, the perfect society.
- The Star Trek Shatnerverse novel Captain's Glory lampshades all the "perfect societies" Kirk and Spock have visited over the years. Kirk says, "Spock, how many times did we visit a planet where the leaders said they had created the perfect society? And all we had to do to achieve perfection was to not ask any questions."
- Star Wars Legends:
- Outbound Flight expands that Palpatine had actually foreseen the Yuuzhan Vong, and his entire purpose for the powergrab and superweapon production was so that there'd be a united galaxy able to deal with them when they come. However, the Empire has spent those years in power on exploiting planets and enslaving the billions to build its war machines and has actively caused the total extinction of several alien races. If the Empire had remained in power when the Vong arrived, the galaxy would have been half empty of other races, while the Vong only pushed them to near extinction.
- The Essential Guide to Warfare implies that most of the Imperial Navy's officers and personnel, with the notable exceptions of Grand Moff Tarkin and Admiral Motti (who were closer to Dystopia Justifies the Means), fought under the genuine belief that they were trying to bring peace and order to the galaxy.
- 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. Anyone who resists this plan naturally is also killed or at least enslaved.
- In Uglies, 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.
- Ultimate Hero has the superhero Ultimate deciding to rely on this logic, to excuse his actions in taking over the world.
- Both the sort-of Designated Villains and the utterly Designated Heroes in the Underground Zealot series are quite happy about mass slaughter of non-combatants of their opposite number to achieve their goals. The main difference between the two is that the evil atheists actually have succeeded in building their utopia (as long as you're also an atheist, which about 95% of the population seems to be) and are trying to keep it that way, while the good Christians are working to overthrow it with their own utopia.
- Most villain groups in Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War operates under this assumption, trying to create a utopia with brutal methods: the Nazis purge the Jews in their state, the environmentalists set up totalitarian rationing and animal protection laws to save nature, the feminists expel men to create a Lady Land, and so on. Even the heroes qualify in their own way, creating their own brand of Retro Universe utopia by purging their country of leftism and modern art.
- Villains by Necessity: The Good crowd thinks it does, if it's even occurred to them that not everything they do is automatically right in the first place. Since the Victory over the forces of Evil, they've been brainwashing or killing anyone who isn't pure Good ever since to create a utopia. The plot is sparked since this is imbalancing the world, and will destroy it if not ended.
- This is the motivation of almost every villainous character in War of the Dreaming — except the Big Bad, who wants a straight-up Villain World.
- 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 have delved 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.
- Emhyr var Emreis, Emperor of Nilfgaard, one of the main antagonists (sort of) in The Witcher, reveals at the culmination of the last book that, according to an ancient prophecy, he and he alone may 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 character's 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 II, 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 Jack Williamson's story "With Folded Hands...", robots programmed in part to "prevent humans from harming themselves" spread from world to world and create "utopias" where they stop people from doing anything because it could potentially harm them. If a person tries to kill themselves from the sheer boredom of life, the robots will "reprogram" him to love this new life. At the end of the story, the protagonist kills himself while the robots are just starting to take over Earth, after realizing there was nothing that could be done to stop them. Given that life is (eventually) fatal...
- In "A World Called Maanerek", the Hegemony wants to reunite all mankind. Even Sonna thinks it noble until she realizes they don't want to ally with her people but exterminate them so they won't interfere.
