The only reason that Lyotard, arguably the founder of post-modernism, wasn’t a neoreactionary was because he was a neopagan.

NRx: Lyotard criticized the Marx, the Enlightenment, and French Revolution, saw the Bourbon monarchy as ideal, glorified capitalism, hated abstraction

In a very Molbuggian and Schmittian move he understood that the previous political philosophies were really theologies and manifestations of religious heresies. But -

Neopagan: Lyotard’s whole project was to revolution against the “Greek masculinity of Plato” with a revolution

led by “antirational woman” and would lead us into a new era full of individual micronarratives instead of grand universal metanarratives. The one grand sign of injustice is to put one the logic of this one’s micronarrative in another group or individual’s micro narrative

Essentially this just leads to ethnonarcissism and radical individualism where everyone must cater to everyone’s demands and mutually translate to go into a “neutralized” frame of reference of mutual understanding a la Habermas. This is impossible and stupid, leading back to an

emotivist theory of ethics and Rawlsian liberalism that MacIntyre demolished in After Virtue. Taken to its logical extreme, nothing is technically off limit as long as you don’t pretend to speak for everyone. That’s what spurred Lyotard to sign the infamous 1977 French petition

against age of consent laws. If Lyotard simply didn’t follow a neopagan theology, he wouldn’t have been a dumb lib and pedo. NRx is based on Catholic theology (Moldbug is a Catholic atheist whereas most libs and leftists are Protestant atheists) and postmodernism is neopagan

theology (not old paganism, but modern). There’s still a lot of good things a right winger or reactionary can take from Lyotard considering the shared assumptions that abstract universals are bad and the Enlightenment sucked. Lyotard correctly saw in much modern ideology a

false theological basis, but he went wrong in thinking that you can escape theology, ending up in promoting a new theology instead like Comte. Regardless, he showed some keen insights into criticizing Marx, the nature of capitalism, and theology as the basis of science, culture,

and politics. He even correctly predicted that with the decline of theology our assumptions about the ability of science to obtain absolute truth would also fail. Science would justify itself not on its ability to find the truth but its ability to improve human life and comfort

through technical mastery of the world, focusing more on efficiency and production rather on truth and goodness. This in turn lends science to be a tool for elites to continue their domination over the population as science is amoral and only focused on efficiency. Lyotard

correctly predicted that in order for science to legitimize itself, it would appeal to the growing need for information machines in the forms of computer to keep track of life. He also correctly predicted that in order for knowledge to be considered useful, it will have to be in

the form of computerized data that can be used efficiently in terms of production and mastery over the world. Science and technology, in the absence of theology, would take over the world and transform life into an inhuman dystopia run for efficiency rather than human welfare.

Science in the absence of culture and narrative (dependent on theology) does not lead to human liberation or progress (which Lyotard understands as bankrupt) but rather to human slavery as it’s an a tool to satisfy desire, including the desire for domination over others.

Machines will run the world for their own sake, to be more and more efficient as humans work to satisfy machines than vice-versa in the name of greater efficiency to satisfy desire, which itself is produced and perpetuated by machines in the most glaring example of the inhuman.