Royal Mail is thrashing around in its death throes, being crushed by a pincer movement of duplicitous management and politicians on one hand, and lumpen, Jurassic, union belligerence on the other. It may not survive. This is an almost unique social catastrophe in that not only does its outcome really matter to us all in the most personal manner, but also it’s difficult to take sides or apportion blame.

It’s easy to listen to the archaic language of the leader of the ­Communication Workers Union, Billy Hayes, and shudder with the memory of those semi-literate, portly, florid-faced, narcissistic bullies that used to lead the country’s most powerful unions, until those same ­leaders’ self-serving motives pulled down their organisations, their members, and the admirable political ideal of worker solidarity. Then one listens to the substance of what he’s actually saying, on behalf of thousands of men and women who work too hard for too little and fear for their jobs. Take a longer look, albeit through your fingers, at that repugnant pantomime demon King Mandelson and his sidekick Crosier, and start to feel some sympathy.

But there aren’t just two sides to this, are there? There are three. There’s us, the public. The ones who don’t get the vital cheque, the hospital appointment, the longed-for card or letter, the parcel or the eBay jumper, yet still somehow manage to receive the Currys Crazy Electrical Sale flyer and a Lego catalogue. The ones who think twice about posting anything, who watch a “you were out” card float through the letter box and find the postie you’ve chased down the street hasn’t got the parcel at all.

The ones who still queue for 20 minutes in a post office that resembles a 1950s Soviet Union fish shop, watching while bewildered pensioners are served reluctantly by a disinterested girl wearing a sweatshirt declaring FCUK to their faces. (This, unbelievably, actually happens in our local.)

And we’re also the ones who have failed to protest as services that were dear to us, and that we took for granted, have been stripped away, from Highland post buses to twice daily and early-morning deliveries, as if such impoverishments were inevitable and there was nothing that could be done.

How can this possibly be resolved? All sides agree that Royal Mail resembles a bead and wire abacus in our shiny, bright new world of instant communication and high-speed connections, and both union and management insist they want to modernise. Unfortunately, in addition to that shared goal, Mandelson’s agenda is to ruthlessly privatise and seek political revenge, and Hayes’ is to test ­government resolve and flex the last remaining vestiges of power remaining in workers’ hands.

Well done everybody. We all lose. So it’s at this juncture that we should squint into the future and have a guess at what Royal Mail is going to look like when the service we all know and still, despite everything, love, disappears for good. Commercial modernisation is unlikely to mean more, or better, or ingenious new services. It will mean paring down, cutting back, reining in to increase profitability, almost certainly for the benefit of the private firms that will consume the broken remains after this murderous dispute, and to the detriment of important core values.

The overriding concern is whether the public-service remit – the very heart of The Royal Mail that has been slowly and covertly eroded for many years as management have tried to run it as a business instead of a service – can remain intact. Will Mrs McKay still get her letters delivered to her door in Benbecula, or will she have to pay for them when she picks them up from a Hebridean central collection point? Will there still be a daily service of any kind? Will parcels have to be collected and post offices become more about selling pet insurance and financial services than receiving pensions or buying stamps? And, indeed, what about stamps? Will the old, comforting reassurance that a standard-priced little square of sticky paper with the Queen’s head on it guarantees a letter’s safe journey from Devon to Kirkwall, just as it does for a similar letter travelling three miles, be a promise that will disappear forever? Will it simply no longer be cost effective?

It’s interesting how an ­incorruptible and unconditionally egalitarian postal service has been highlighted in fiction for decades, for instance by novelist Thomas Pynchon and actor Kevin Costner to name just a couple, as being one of the cornerstones of civilisation. There’s definitely something in that. A postal facility that prioritises the consistency and reliability of all, not just some, citizens’ communications is a genuinely humane service and one that is as vital as any other that binds social cohesion. That it is so threatened highlights our complete powerlessness in the dispute.

We’re seeing what Royal Mail can do to exert its authority. We know what oily depths Baron Von Mandelson can sink to and we’re horribly aware of the ransom-demanding supremacy of the CWU.

But what can we do? We can’t boycott it or we exacerbate the problem. In fact our continuing desertion of the ­service is part of the problem. There seems little individual action we can take. Yet if we do nothing, simply watch in horror from the sidelines as an institution that is for many as much a personal lifeline as a business tool, and more importantly a symbol of adherence to the consensus of a connected society, then we will only have ourselves to blame.

This weekend was threatened to be dominated by preposterous religious protests, when it would have been more heartening to see angry citizens with placards taking to the streets demanding protection for a service that is irreplaceable. The Royal Mail has always been much more than just a business and both bickering sides are belittling it with their wilful misunderstanding of this stark fact.