Utopianism is Perfectionism, as opposed to Progressivism. It's unsound to believe that's possible to elminiate all problems, and someone having a belief that utopis is possible is s strong signal of either deceit or stupidity.
Surely you meant to say that it's a strong signal of not being completely candid, or of being disingenuous :)
I like the perfectionism vs progressivism thing. My analogy would have been that it's like "the truth": if you think you're in full possession of the full truth, or ever could be, that's silly. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to learn more, be more honest, and so on. "truth" with a small t is still a useful concept. But it's always subjective, and requires people figuring that out both alone, with nothing between themselves and their conscience, and together (which will never change it to being objective, or completely agreed upon by all, or mean 100% the same thing even for two identical twins who "totally agree" on it).
Just like one could say we are the "result" of what our cells are doing all the time (I know you really couldn't simplify it like that at all, but for the sake of argument), society is the result of the daily decisions of the actual people in it - what they think others expect of them, and whether they listen to that or their inner voice, and so on.
It seems to me many want to change society "on" others rather than with them, you might say they would rather attempt to change society on a drawing board to change their neighbours, than get to know their neighbours and themselves in the first place. But societies aren't really that different from personal relations and families. People grow over time, societies grow, decay or heal over time, too -- not as the result of turning a switch or throwing out everything that was before on a dime, just because we really want to.
> Until now the totalitarian belief that everything is possible seems to have proved only that everything can be destroyed.
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
