Utopia, in its most charitable definition, is the dream of a perfected society—an ideal civilization imagined to be attainable through reason, technology, or moral progress. The word itself, coined by Thomas More, is a linguistic warning masquerading as hope. Derived from the Greek eu-topos (“good place”) and ou-topos (“no place”), utopia is, by definition, a contradiction: a perfect world that cannot exist.
And yet, humanity keeps trying to build it.
From Plato’s Republic to More’s Utopia, the. . .