A warning bell for me is that (in my experience) his fans almost uniformly recommend watching or listening to recordings of Peterson himself speaking. Not transcripts, not articles, not a canon of closely aligned materials by his grad students. The power to convey these truths evidently resides in Peterson and Peterson alone. That suggests to me something closer to a cult of personality than anything like a robust theory.

I'm biased, though, because I find his lectures really difficult to follow. At least in the ones I've watched, he exhibits an oddly rambling style of speech that seems optimized more for some kind of narrative rhythm than for clearly conveying semantic content. He's very good at making it feel like every word is important, but then when I go back and try to figure out the actual statement being made it's like whole sentences just sort of fold in on themselves until nothing is left.

>Not transcripts, not articles, not a canon of closely aligned materials by his grad students. The power to convey these truths evidently resides in Peterson and Peterson alone.

I don't think that's entirely true. The Peterson fan-groups on Reddit often have group readings of books that haven't been written by Peterson but have been recommended (Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Solzhenitsyn).

I do agree that there's something of a cult of personality surrounding Peterson, and for that reason I try to keep that in mind and keep him at arm's length despite agreeing with a lot of what he says. But I do think that such behaviors are common and inevitable. Consider the "I f*cking love science" crowd and their focus on clips from Neil deGrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan (their written material is a distant second in popularity to their broadcast presentation) or the trend a few years ago of receiving news through a Stewart/Colbert-style format of ideology + humor. There's something almost inescapable about the human desire to associate with a group/club/tribe, to find a leader to rally around, and to indulge the urge to worship.

Largely, I have to agree with you. Although, I decided to keep that observation separate from my issues stated above. It disturbs me about the amount of young people 'fawning' over him. There are people whom I will admit vastly more intelligent and more erudite than myself, people whose opinions or reasoning I would would give great weight to when considering, people whom I would call first order geniuses, even, but I can stand to see people turn their lives over to them and outsource their thinking.

And I can't help but feel Peterson knows this. (His field alone should equip him with knowledge of these circumstances.) And it sometimes flashes through my mind that Edward Bernays has brought Freud to America all over again (which is not necessarily an indictment of Freud directly so much as how his techniques were put to use), and that Peterson, and others like him, know on one level exactly what they are doing. After all, evolution has primed us to jockey into position for the best possible access to mates, and power has always been intimately connected with that. (Which is another ways that Peterson reminds me on the 'Bernaysian Era', when the rich elite needed to guide the irrational masses but managed to conveniently ignore the applicability of those very same theories to themselves and their own motivations for operation.)

I have similar background and negative experiences, but I don't get the alarm bells but rather makes me appreciate some things I was being reached when young and also sad that the my fundamentalists parents weren't more like him. I'm am atheist as it gets but the Bible studies by him are fascinating. I remember the Bible stories very well but never thought about them in that light.

It's not the Biblical references / usages that bothers me, and that's in and of itself is not what I mean. I engage with it theology myself and often respect theological thinkers in regards to their arguments. This is always the problem when I try to bring this up: trying to convey that it is a religiosity creeping in, but a fundamental desire that exists as the foundational impetus of what we call religiosity, but which can find expression through other avenues in ways that are not immediately recognized as such.