Douglas, I'm struggling to articulate something that might help achieve what you're talking about. It's a way of thinking about truth that looks for the ground instead of the stars, in the ways you talk about in this piece.

Reading your piece, my thought was "We're never going to escape models." Then at the end of your piece, my thought was "the purpose of the model we want to turn to is authenticity" -- the authenticity you talk about.

We need to look at humanity's "civilized" way of life through a lens that in every moment we live brings to the fore what is authentic and inauthentic in everything we see, without the distortion you talk about in the models that grip our lives now:

https://alexbennett-ap.medium.com/truth-units-a-new-theory-of-truth-for-our-post-truth-world-9734119080c2

Please take a look to see if this a "tool" that can serve your vision.