I watched 30m of a Peterson lecture a co-worker recommended to me. It kind of opened my eyes. Peterson is basically a ‘motivational speaker’ that presents himself as an academic well enough to fool people that only understand academic aesthetics. He doesn’t even try to back up his claims or references, he just makes wildly abstract and generalized claims about human civilization and draws analogies that support that perspective. They sound right enough to people that want to believe that there is an expression of their culture that is inherently ‘good’ and all of civilization’s problems are based on corruptions of that culture. But in the minds of his fans he’s offering ‘proof’ of this perspective by appearing academic, even though he offers none.

Well, before we can say that Peterson is fooling people by only aesthetically presenting as an academic first we need to define fooling, then we need to define academic and then we need to define presenting. Without that shared substrate we can’t make any value judgements about him because of we don’t have that, we don’t have anything.