Short answer is, humans gonna human. As to whether it's been tried, I would say that the Socialism I'm referring to was implemented quite successfully in the U

Short answer is, humans gonna human. As to whether it's been tried, I would say that the Socialism I'm referring to was implemented quite successfully in the United States in the 30s, and its benefits persisted into approximately the 70s, at which point the cohort which remembered why The New Deal happened had aged out and their children started dismantling all the apparatus in a fever dream of capitalist ideology, which they've been promising would produce a utopia, but which if you look out of any window in the USA, you will has done quite a good job of producing that same anti-utopia you referred to. As I said, humans gonna human. Agent Elrond talked about this in The Matrix. His machine empire perspective was that we don't want to be happy. I think that chaos provides opportunities for opportunists, and there are those who know this and seek to create order, and there are those who know this and seek to create chaos, for exactly the reasons you might suspect. [edit: and then of course, there's the endless herds of prey who do not know this.] If you read 1984, you know that "If there's hope, it's in the proles" is kind of a mantra that Winston repeats to himself throughout the story, and one which ultimately is replaced by a boot crushing a human face, forever. At the same time, Orwell was a Socialist. The 20th Century is a set of chapters in a story that runs back through the centuries, and that endless war that goes hot and cold and on and on is the real story there. To pin the blame for the dystopias of that time on the ideology that ruled over them is to miss the plot; I could as well say that free market economies are inherently dystopic based on the evidence outside your American doorway, and be just as wrong. America struck the right balance for a while, and everyone benefitted, and then the corporate raiders took over, with Ronnie McRaygun as their exuberant figurehead. And they just keep hitting that corporate welfare pipe to keep the party going, but the hangover is coming, boyo, and it's either gonna go socialist or it's gonna go fascist and then socialist. Let's skip the unpleasant part this time. Narrator in 2050: They didn't.