Just because a state is unattainable does not mean we should not use it as a vision to guide action. Companies need a clear vision in business. They need to coordinate their actions in an effort to achieve a future state. Political actors need that also.

The issue is not that people are striving for utopia, it’s that they ignore “error” signals that their efforts are doing more harm than good. You don’t need to be utopians to do that. Groups with no unifying ideology but with material self interest can also ignore “error” signals and do more harm than good.

What’s terrible is for groups to use compulsion to force others to conform to the group’s vision of utopia. Politics is the art of living with people and groups who disagree with you. Unless interests collide, nothing political is happening. If you attempt to make that struggle go away by forcing one solution where everybody must be the same, that is the real problem, I think.

People will develop and follow utopian ideas, and it can be intellectually useful to do so, in order to expose and examine your assumptions. Plato does this intellectual exercise in the Republic. And it is okay for people to bond over them and take political action based on them.

It is a bit dumb for anyone with utopian ideas to believe the world either can or should conform tightly to their ideas. You need to make room for safe and healthy conflict, with parameters, and live with joy alongside neighbours who do not endorse your idea of a utopia.

Utopian impulses are tolerable, and people will have them, but when groups of people captivated by shared impulses use violence to compel others to live and act in accordance with the utopian impulses, that is a well-worn path to atrocity.

That’s one reason Winston Churchill said liberal democracy was the worst possible governmental system - except for all the others. It’s flawed but provides mechanisms for people with different visions of the good society to work together - or to successively make their contributions to the evolving social order.

The way I like to think of it is that human political life is more complex than human ideas will ever reflect. That is why if you have stable but changeable institutions, and various political coalitions inside them trying this and that over time, the aggregate result - which will always have flaws, is workable.

But nothing is that simple... the structure and scope of the institutions is also contested, hence political. And that is just the start of a list of “not that simples”.

I do follow my own path... which is why I do not follow what religions say.