Watching the Greeks cast about for a way to make math go away has been fascinating to me. Everyone knows the Greeks can never repay their debts. Everyone knows they will never make the reforms required to keep receiving aid from the rest of Europe. Yet, everyone keeps pretending otherwise and not just for appearances. It seems they really believe that mathematics will yield to wishful thinking.

Anthropologists assume that in modern times, complex societies cannot collapse. They can weaken and go through a process of reform, but they cannot collapse. The reason is every society is adjacent to another complex society. Collapse would lead to being taken over by a neighbor. Even a screwed up society like Greece will suck it up and do what is necessary to fix their walls and rebuild their core rather than become a province of Turkey or Bulgaria.

But, we don’t know that. It is just assumed to be true because it has always been true.  Things are true until they are not. Not so long ago, it was inconceivable that a member state would face financial collapse and now the Greeks are now preparing for bankruptcy.

Greece is preparing to take the dramatic step of declaring a debt default unless it can reach a deal with its international creditors by the end of April, according to people briefed on the radical leftist government’s thinking.

The government, which is rapidly running out of funds to pay public sector salaries and state pensions, has decided to withhold €2.5bn of payments due to the International Monetary Fund in May and June if no agreement is struck, they said.

“We have come to the end of the road . . . If the Europeans won’t release bailout cash, there is no alternative [to a default],” one government official said.

A Greek default would represent an unprecedented shock to Europe’s 16-year-old monetary union only five years after Greece received the first of two EU-IMF bailouts that amounted to a combined €245bn.

The warning of an imminent default could be a negotiating tactic, reflecting the government’s aim of extracting the easiest possible conditions from Greece’s creditors, but it nevertheless underlined the reality of fast-emptying state coffers.

Default is a prospect for which other European governments, irritated at what they see as the unprofessional negotiating tactics and confrontational rhetoric of the Greek government, have also begun to make contingency plans.

In the short term, a default would almost certainly lead to the suspension of emergency European Central Bank liquidity assistance for the Greek financial sector, the closure of Greek banks, capital controls and wider economic instability.

Although it would not automatically force Greece to drop out of the eurozone, a default would make it much harder for Alexis Tsipras, prime minister, to keep his country in the 19-nation area, a goal that was part of the platform on which he and his leftist Syriza party won election in January.

No one really knows what will happen if the Greeks default. There will be lots of hooting and hollering. Capital will rush out of the country as Greeks try to stash their savings abroad, but that’s most happened anyway. The banks will fail and close down. The economy, for a short period will seize up. Civil unrest will be inevitable. A military coup is not out of the question, as in times of turmoil, the guys with the guns tend to have an edge.

To the average Greek, this could feel like the end to the world, but it does not qualify as a collapse by the standards of anthropology. Greece is in no risk of dissolving. A coup would just mean new leaders in charge of the same society. Similarly, Tsipras crowning himself king would simply be a modification of the organizational chart and small one at that. Reform would simply be handed to an authoritarian.

It’s tempting to pin the reason for all of this on democracy. Critics of democracy have always pointed to the quote allegedly from Alexander Fraser Tyler, “A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.” In short, democracy becomes organized looting that accelerates into chaos.

That’s pithy and useful, I suppose, but not accurate. It’s easy to pin the blame on the freeloaders and loafers. Democracy may increase their influence, but it also strengthens more responsible elements in society too. Modern elections are always over some problem that needs solving and the winner is almost always the one promising a solution.

Even in Greece, the main parties representing the ruling elite tried to force through changes in the face of their fiscal crisis. When all of your options on the ballot are calling for the same things, democracy has been suspended. It was only when the main parties failed to come up with a way to address the crisis that the lunatic parties moved to the fore, offering nothing of substance, just a catharsis.

It seems to me that what is happening in Greece is a part of a longer process that is happening in the West. The Greeks joined the Euro for a reason. The Euro, of course, was not created to give bureaucrats something to do during the day. The whole project, including the addition of Greece, was an attempt to solve a problem.

Publicly, the problem they claim to be addressing is the long history of conflict in Europe. Economic cooperation, then a single currency and eventually, political unity. That’s the part above the waves. The part below the waves is the diminishing returns of the organizational model developed over the last two centuries. They are grasping about for some way to make work the mathematics of social democracy.

The math of social democracy is all about diminishing marginal returns. The first big programs like public education and aid to the poor had big returns, far more than the costs. Subsequent investments in complex social management netted smaller returns, but still more than the costs. Over time, the inertia of progress forced greater investment in complexity, aimed at mitigated or ameliorating the human condition, well past the point of diminishing returns.

In this regard, the Greeks are an example of what lies ahead for all of Europe and the West. They joined the Euro because it looked like a solution to their problem, but it only delayed the inevitable. Now they desperately try to kick the can further down the road, but there’s not much road left. What comes next is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it will simply be a disorganized dismantling of decades of social complexity, a national version of a reorganization through bankruptcy.