CONTESTIVISM: A Paradigm of Meaning, Power, and Being for Understanding Social Reality

This paper develops contestivism as a meta-paradigm for understanding social reality as perpetual contestation of meaning through and for power. The framework operates from the foundational premise that meaning constitutes a necessary condition for human being: to lose control is to risk existential erasure. Contestivism theorizes the structural grammar underlying all social phenomena through three intersecting analytical dimensions: domains of contestation, orders of social organization, and modes of power. These elements form recursive engines that generate gradients of being that motivate further contestation. Unlike frameworks that pathologize competing realities, contestivism recognizes meaning contests as the fundamental mechanism of human social organization. The framework offers analytical tools for understanding the post-truth era as the inevitable condition of human society.