This itself is an epistemological matter.

You've listed a perfectly reasonable high level summary of some of the problems....but is this summary actually true, comprehensively? For example: "There are four cities in China" is also a true statement.

There's one fundamental thing most everyone overlooks when engaging in examination of reality: you're not actually dealing with reality, but rather a sophisticated and invisible model of it - and it is because of this (fundamentally, with massive amounts of additional nuanced details) that I believe at least some decent background in the fundamentals of epistemology (plus: logic, linguistics, semantics, psychology, meditation/mindfulness, etc) are required for humanity to get a handle on this out of control bus we're all riding in.

And the scariest part to me: not only is there no serious initiative underway or under discussion approaching the problem from this perspective (unless I've somehow not encountered it in my searching), rare is the individual who is not opposed to the validity of the notion. As crazy as it sounds, I truly believe there is something hard wired in the human mind cutting off our access to such ideas - it seems not possible for people to even consider it.