Instead of the usual Jesus fans and animal rights champions, Edinburgh’s Princes Street has most recently housed the carnival-like yes camp: a movement of artisanal democracy lovers talking about possibilities and dancing to the Scottish indie band Kid Canaveral with fistfuls of flyers. I get it – it’s not your typical flavour of political activism, and was always bound to get some accusations. An affronted octogenarian grabs me and punctuates every syllable of her mistrust with a bony digit to the arm, denouncing me as an "idealist who is leading us all down the Swanee" – the face of evil forcing Standard Life to leave. Standing as part of the young-yes movement puts you in the asteroid belt of projection, speculation and blame. With all this colour, music and audacity, we’re idealising the campaign, apparently. Are we guilty? No.

Amid the more paper-thin pro-union arguments, perhaps the most infuriating, after the claim that we’re a bunch of mercenary nationalists is the idea that we’re hopeless romantics: a divisive parochial whine that splits us into factions – nationalists versus unionists, romantics versus pragmatists, Salmonders versus Cameronites. These stigmatise yes as bigoted, patriotic SNP voters and Better Together as sleekit Tory sycophants. The pervasive gripe seems to be that if the economy is not your number one, you’re not taking it seriously and are a deluded hippy fixating on a land of milk and honey. Why is it so hard to imagine something else?

Capitalism is guilty of fostering the attitude that if we throw enough money at it, a problem will magically disappear. It has us blindly chasing pounds – money good, no money bad. That’s not to say the economy is unimportant. Let’s not kid ourselves: without it we’d be stuffed. But it’s just not that simple when you live in a society rather than a market. Looking to the economy above all else is hopelessly blinkered.

In a world motivated by cash over caring, warnings of prudence for fear of fiscal oblivion obscure reality. To scratch beneath the surface of Mark Carney & Co’s pontificating is to stare into the barrel of a regime that fattens fat pockets while stratifying those it is supposed to represent.

The truth is that the UK is sick. We’re the new poster boy for social dysfunction – an indictment ratified by many academic studies, the Unicef child wellbeing index and, more locally, the Scottish index of multiple deprivation. We are one of the most unequal nations in the developled world – the most unequal in Europe, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Our richest 20% are 7.5 times richer than the poorest 20%.

The social cost reads like hell’s Christmas list, and includes shortened life expectancy, more illness, illiteracy, higher infant mortality, more homicides, more imprisonments, less trust, more obesity, higher rates of mental illness – including drug and alcohol addiction – and far lower social mobility. If you’re poor in the UK, get your slippers on, because you’re going nowhere.

We’re living in a first-world country where policy causes toxic structural poverty – where people rob houses for food, and families are punted from their modest homes over a tax. We need the freedom to dismantle the system completely. Most of us praying at the altar of independence are not deluding ourselves with fantasies of oil fountains and plump bank balances. We’re doing it because we need change far beyond control of our own finances.

With two broken parties who refuse to tackle income gaps, permit tax havens, cut benefits, financially penalise the poor and strangle essential services, Scotland’s wellbeing is a monopoly in their hands. Is it idealism to fix that? Can it even be idealism when there are social democratic models working internationally that reduce this inequality?

Looking beyond the economy is far from romantic. It’s a combination of gulping down bitter injustices, finding hope, and facing the fact that it’s going to be a leviathan task. If we dare to accept the bigger picture, we stand to be a whole lot richer, in so many ways.