Stuck between a rock and a hard place. This particular phrase probably encapsulates the post-truth condition more than it should, yet here we are. On one hand, many still subscribe to the idea of a singular, objective reality that can be accessed with the right epistemological tools. On the other hand, a pluralistic approach that embraces equally valid realities, where the positivist lens is just one of many, is becoming an increasingly acceptable explanation for our current social configuration. Epistemic truth is not just debatable; it is experiential — personal, even. Reality has reproduced itself into fractured, competing versions depending on the observer, and as a result, discourse has morphed into a shadow of its former constructive self.

When faced with this impossible choice, we grasp for explanations of why others seem so committed to “wrong” realities, and we typically reach for one of three frameworks: pathology, strategy, or machinery. These are the cartographic tools at our disposal for navigating the shifting terrain of meaning, and they’re not enough.

Pathology explains ontological deviance as individual dysfunction, caused by any number of cognitive failures, ranging from bad heuristics to poor education to mental illness. This locates the problem in the person, bringing forth appropriate interventions like media literacy and inoculation against false beliefs. Strategy flips this by using individual agency as a plausible explanation. People know what they’re doing, and they’re doing it for a reason. This view paints individuals as manipulative “bad actors” who project their own truths as some kind of calculation to advance rational self-interest and respond to their material conditions. This framing is carried through the proposed fixes, such as combating information interference and manipulation. Machinery sees the problem as a systemic product, where algorithmic influence and institutional authority are understood as creating the necessary conditions for a post-truth reality. This explanation calls for structural and regulatory solutions, including platform regulation and anti-trust action against technological monopolies.

What if all three explanations miss something more fundamental? Many draw upon some or all of these frameworks to create comprehensive solutions to the multiple reality “problem,”  which itself points to something more foundational that operates underneath these interpretations of the issue. What if people aren’t primarily motivated by cognitive accuracy, strategic manipulation, or systemic compulsion, but by something deeper: the existential need to maintain their very being by defining their reality through projections of meaning? And what if the emergence of competing realities isn’t a breakdown of rational discourse or a failure of information systems, but the inevitable result of human beings asserting their right to exist meaningfully in the world?

This is the starting point for contestivism: a paradigm that views social reality as perpetual contestation of meaning through and for power, where the stakes are nothing less than being itself. Rather than treating competing worldviews as pathology to cure, strategy to counter, or machinery to reconstruct, contestivism recognizes them as expressions of the fundamental human drive to establish and defend meaning as a condition for existence.

The paradigm reveals the structural grammar underlying all meaning contests — including the very debates about truth and reality that characterize our current moment. It provides analytical tools for understanding how meaning emerges, stabilizes, and transforms without requiring us to adjudicate which meanings are “correct” or assign moral judgment to their proponents. Most importantly, it acknowledges that these contests aren’t peripheral to social life — they are social life, and they’re happening whether we recognize them or not.

This paper develops contestivism as both a theoretical framework and an analytical lens, demonstrating how it can illuminate phenomena from political polarization to identity formation to social change. By understanding social reality as perpetual contestation rather than fixed truth or infinite relativism, we gain tools for understanding the post-truth era not as a symptom of an underlying problem, but as an inevitable condition of human society.

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