One simple, ideal way for my utopia to really happen would be to have a wealthy patron who would be a benevolent dictator who own's the land and the building, a

One simple, ideal way for my utopia to really happen would be to have a wealthy patron who would be a benevolent dictator who own's the land and the building, and has ultimate responsibility for keeping the lights on, etc. The benefit to him would be the same benefit as to us all: to live simply, peacefully, among people who are striving for some level of moral perfection. Key to this would be a) sharing values, and b) having a minimum level of success with those values that your presence would not be disruptive. Yoga and meditation tacitly imply the kinds of values I mean: morality, concentration, wisdom (actually, the 3 parts of the Noble Path of Buddhism). Part b comes from my experience: I have met many people (myself included) who believe in the path but find it difficult to stay on it. I suspect that it is far, far easier to walk the path among others with the same stated goal, and that would be the main thrust of such an experiment. A benevolent dictator would solve the problems inherent in determining who should stay, who should go, and why. I'm less concerned about malicious people than about well-meaning people who are, through no fault of their own, disruptive because they cannot control their own behavior. Any group can survive a certain amount of this; but how much? When is the threshold reached? Of course, benevolent dictators are hard to find - and of course, people change, so a BDFL my slowly morph into something different. One possibility is to make the BDFL a computer program, one that is revised according to certain stringent rules involving consensus. The ideal program would be extremely passive, pushing gently here and there, sometimes in quite unexpected ways, to correct patterns that it predicts will yield a terrible outcome if left unchecked. I think such a thing is possible, but may be outside of the realm of possibility as of yet, since it requires such complete modeling of personality.