Thoughts on Creating Utopia

One thing that occurred to me near the end of class was that perhaps Plato fails in creating a believable utopia because he fails to integrate a method of social moderation into its governmental structure. I feel like for many of us the big problem with his ideal city is that he trusts the gold-souled Guardians to promote equality and refrain from abusing their power. While this may have seemed reasonable to him based on his personal worldview, to us it is obvious that the Guardians are human and therefore flawed. At some point, they are bound to abuse their power. One of the key indicators that a utopia has become dystopic is the presence of some sort of power imbalance where one person or group of people abuses the governmental power that is meant to moderate human behavior. I would argue that perhaps the best way to avoid this, then, is to make it so that everyone within the utopia has the same amount of power. While this may seem impossible, there are actually some groups that have implemented consensus-based policies with some degree of success. As some of you already know, I go to a Quaker Meeting (kind of like church, I can explain more when it’s relevant). At the Meeting, all major decisions that effect the group as a whole are discussed at Meeting for Business, where anyone who wishes to speak on the matter can do so and no decision is made until everyone has agreed on a way to move forward. While this would likely never work for a conventional government, it can work for groups on a national scale - the same general system is used by the entirety of Friends General Conference (the national Quaker organization my Meeting belongs to), with smaller issues being decided by individual Meetings and larger ones being passed on to larger segments of the group. So if it can work on a national scale for a religious group, could a smaller governmental group not exist in a theoretical utopian society? What are your thoughts? Sorry this post is so disorganized, these are basically just my cursory thoughts on the matter and I will likely elaborate on them later.