People are free to disagree and I certainly do. You can claim that the failing of the Culture are scenaristic conceits needed to have a plot for a book, that's

People are free to disagree and I certainly do. You can claim that the failing of the Culture are scenaristic conceits needed to have a plot for a book, that's an easy cop-out. The Culture is what the books shows. That its flaws were only made up to have a story doesn't change that. In my opinion, when people claim the Culture is a prefect utopia, they base their view on a non-existent Culture, that of everything good seen in the book with the unsavory part s excised as book-writing-fodder unnatural warts. Bu that's different thing, a made-up, cleaned-up version of the Culture. To me, the Minds clearly are toying with humans for a subtle version of cruelty. I'll just take the "Player of Games" as the most explicit example (although "Surface Details" is pretty telling too): the Culture has been monitoring the Azad for decades, fully knowing how corrupt and evil they are, horribly torturing people 24/7. Yet they take decades before even setting up a contact. Ironically (if we can call it that) the novel ends with the events the Minds claim as their reason for not intervening directly. I find the Minds behaviour described through Special Circumstances to be consistently amoral.