I wouldn't say he's "full of it". His clinical practice of 30 years has at least provided him with a deep insight into the very common problems that beset many people. He translated that into his basic "rules for life" book, which was in a sense "pop psychology" but at the same time seems to resonate with a lot of people. I don't think there's any reason to doubt him when he says many people come up to him and tell him how he helped them in their lives.
His basic message, particularly to young people and particularly in Western nations, but potentially applicable to anyone, is "stop moping around and being depressed about how crap your life is and find something challenging and useful (to yourself and ideally others) to do to provide you with a sense of purpose and meaning. Then you won't feel so depressed".
Now that might sound like a very basic message that "everyone knows", but it seems an awful lot of people don't know it (again, especially young people) and we have to remember the dysfunctional nature of the society in which those people live that encourages them to be "weak snowflakes" and complain about everything.
So I think he did a service to many people, and for that he deserves credit, but I think that was the extent of his role in this life (and it's not a small one), but since then he has strayed into areas of discourse and global society where his knowledge of the individual does not apply. The analysis and advice that is true and useful for a normal human individual cannot be transposed onto global issues and dynamic that are created and directed by psychopaths and psychopathic groupings. That's apples and oranges. But Peterson's naivety, emotional instability and therefore difficulty in facing objective reality (as the Cs said) leads him into wishful thinking and a "rose colored glasses" view of those global dynamics and, as a result, he gets things horribly wrong.
I don't disagree, but in that comment I also said:
This approach is great for people who are at the stage in life where they don't know what they're doing or they're living in their grandma's basement. Following his precepts would surely improve your life in this case, but it can only get you so far. And if you're the type of person who is seeking the Truth in this life, it is, in fact, a quick path to the dark side, which he clearly proves with his own descent into some type of hell.
To expand on that point, it feels to me like his entire philosophy lacks anything deeper to root it in actual reality, the spiritual reality that we attempt to uncover here.
His positive impact on countless people notwithstanding, it seems to me like following his line of thinking to its ultimate conclusion leads you nowhere but back into the jaws of the control system.
And to address my use of the phrase "full of it", what I'm seeing is that he's shooting in the dark on most of these issues and merely scratches the surface of things while leaving the deeper issues facing humans in this reality to, as Gabor Mate said, repression.
I mean, the fact that he promotes letting toddlers cry it out and sort themselves out on their own calls into question everything else that he bases on his supposed knowledge of the scientific literature.
He's promoting this rugged masculine approach of pulling oneself by the bootstraps and getting one's life in order by sheer will, which is not a bad thing on its own, but can be a pretty detrimental approach in the long run since it seems to me to be highly aligned with the STS path and doing things for oneself. Of course, you're good for nothing to others if you're not in a hlgood way yourself, but I'm just looking at this entire landscape of self improvement on Youtube and it all looks like a very narcissistic cesspool of materialism meant to help people achieve status and feel like they're the top dog.
I'm seeing very little daylight between the stated philosophies of any of these guys promoting this sort of stuff.
I'm looking at the comments and I see so many young guys adopting this entirely materialistic worldview because that's what worked to get them out of the mud, so why seek any further.
There's so much overlap in fans of Tate and Peterson that it's very indicative of thebtype of energy JP espouses, even though he rather meekly denounced Tate once.