It doesn't look quaint now and it didn't look quaint 2,000 years ago when Romans believed that going to war with anyone and everyone around them in order to unify everyone under Rome's banner was for "the greater good".
Justifying the stripping away of rights of individuals for society never results in a "greater good", and the reason that it won't, and not only that - can't, is because as soon as you justify stripping away an individual's rights, then you start looking at the stripping away of a group's rights, and before long you end up with an increasingly larger Venn diagram with an overlap of "groups that hinder society" and "extermination for the greater good".
No thank you. Keep your goddamned "greater good". We've tried it enough. "But that wasn't real <Communism / Socialism / Marxism / Right-wing Authoritarianism / Benevolent Dictatorship / etc.>!" has been and always will be the mantra, because there's always someone dumb enough to think they're smart enough to build the "perfect" society.
And they're all wrong.