There are moments – usually when I'm in a busy, public place that is dominated by a giant screen flashing images of civil unrest, market meltdown, or Christine Lagarde, president of the International Monetary Fund, intoning that the world risks sliding into a 1930s-style slump – when I feel as if I am already living in the dystopian future that I saw as a kid in films such as Bladerunner. The human world, at those times, feels brittle and alienating, a place where our amazing technology does little for us beyond updating, in a flashy live spectacle, a frightening, unstoppable descent into chaos.

Yet at other times, living as I do in the affluent British capital, I am struck even more unsettlingly by the huge extent to which comfortable, pleasure-seeking lives go on regardless. The figures tell a different story, but the shops seem packed with people spending, the restaurants with people eating, and the theatres with people who still have plenty of money to invest in nothing more permanent than having a lovely time. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we will die.

It is hard to work out whether all this breezy London evidence of resilience in the face of great flux is comforting or scary. On the one hand, it reassures – life goes on, money changes hands, the real economy persists – our developed and sophisticated culture surely is too big, too habitual, too established to fail. On the other, it disgusts. In the midst of continuing plenty, working people are taking out extortionate payday loans to put food on the table, legislation progresses through parliament, designed to whittle away cash for disabled children, and Theresa May, the home secretary, denies that feelings of dark detachment from the mainstream of society could possibly be valid or understandable. Back home in Motherwell, Scotland, no giant screens convey the bad news, and no grand festivities offer a counterpoint. Decline has been clearly observable for decades.

For many among us, the truth is the absolute opposite of what May claims, as she throws out her counter-intuitive gibberish about the summer riots. Failure to feel dark detachment would seem much more miraculous, in a country so polarised, so seemingly unable to share out its wealth, or even its wisdom, with some measure of equability, some care for the promotion of a sense of social cohesion, of belonging. But all the political and economic pressures seem to demand that we move away from hopes of social welfare, that despite all the evidence of massive and concentrated private wealth, the solution is to transfer yet more cash from the public to the private realm, this time by throwing billions at the eurozone, to staunch the wounds of its continuing crisis with enormous bloody poultices of cash. The woman at the head of the IMF, who warns us that without such action we all will suffer, has no electoral mandate.

It is almost amusing, that David Cameron's refusal to sign up to a treaty that has already proved materially inconsequential was hailed as so politically significant. Suddenly, in England anyway, he is perceived as being in a strong position. Two polls put his party ahead, and his Europhile coalition partners are so frightened of electoral wipeout that, speculation has it, they are all that stands between Cameron and the electoral majority he craves so much. He may have formally isolated himself, and Britain, in Europe. But in the most important respects, he is just like all the other European leaders, still. He very much wants the eurozone crisis to be "solved",but is not so keen on stumping up the cash that will do it. Politicians, and their treaties, have been made tiny, almost irrelevant, by the despotic and self-sustaining dictatorship of money.

One understands why the reluctance to bail out Europe is so widespread. The consensus now is that the eurozone was doomed to failure from the start. Failure has duly arrived, and paying out to breathe life into an always-dysfunctional system seems like throwing good money after bad. The putative treaty calling for closer fiscal union can be seen as further capitulation to the rule of economics. Cameron may have cited his own country's selfish regulatory reasons for rejecting the treaty. But his refusal could have been meaningful, had it been presented as a last stand against the inexorability of national democracy's decline, and international finance's continued, mindless, heartless domination. (In fact, his argument was that if finance rules, then Britain must remain its most assiduous handmaiden, the opposite of what it should have been.)

The desperate assumption is that the eurozone is "too big to fail", as the banks were. Would it, like the banks, simply continue quite blatantly with its bad habits, its unsquarable contradictions, if the money to bail it out could be found? The harsh reality is that it has failed already, with only fear of disorderly and unpredictable collapse keeping alive the vestiges of its grand ambitions. The trouble is that Europe, politically as well as economically, was a fine idea, but, in practice, was always hopelessly compromised. Even its supposed democratic accountability is faked. The election of members of the European parliament is more like the election of civil servants than politicians. The only high-profile MEPs tend to be those who gained their seat in order to argue against the EU's very existence.

As for the heads of state who make the political decisions, there are already more unelected people at the top table than is right or acceptable. But the technocrats are accepted anyway. Cameron may have opted out of talks on the Cannes treaty. But, as it turns out, his "people" will still be there, still throwing in their tuppence-worth, in the search for a formula that will appease "the markets". The democratic deficit in Europe has always been problematic, and now is teetering on absurd. This is not what Europe was supposed to be. I have always believed in the European ideal. But it is a struggle to identify, in the current mess, where any true expression of that ideal resides.

Amid all the concern and worry over the enormity of the task of propping up Europe lies a nagging feeling that if this institution really is too big, too dominant, too all-encompassing to fail, then it is also too big, too unwieldy, too powerful to succeed. How can something so significant and untouchable be brought to heel? What other institution could have the power to rein in such a behemoth? The IMF? Who wants it to rule the world?

They have their own physical gravity, these huge institutions, it seems, their very mass dictating an inexorable pull, irresistible merely by dint of their dominating existence, greedy for funding, greedy for obeisance, unaccountable, unfathomable. They are just … too big. Too big to be made to pay for their own failures, too big to be made to accept the consequences of the small print, the minuscule and easily ignorable print, that tells them that they have to bear it themselves when their risks blow up in their faces. It is time to choose between democratic accountability, or rule by the markets. This crisis has made one thing clear: we can't have both.