Do we know anything at all about his son or wife? I'm curious about them because it would provide insight into how much he gets high on his own supply (philosophy, not benzos) vs is just a sleazy used car salesman, and given his history as a clinician the distinction is especially interesting.
And its not like we don't have 50 other gurus essentially saying same thing. Why did his message stick? Was it entirely due to his anti-SJW hype?
It probably helped that he had already been advocating self help guru views on a smaller scale as a professor and practitioner, long before he got big, and that in general he's been very good at not falling for the usual tricks used to destroy people they don't like. He found fame later in his career, when he had already learned how to handle himself in front of a camera, an audience, etc, and written one book. Jung sounds really deep and profound if you've never seen it before and don't think too hard about it (Star Wars is pretty popular...), and repackaging it along with the internet daddy simulator shtick really was quite clever*.
What fascinates me is the sheer hatred he inspires from those who have been told to hate him when his main product is generic self help sourced from reheated Jung. Random people in my life will bring him up as that awful Nazi cult leader surprisingly often, and that's all they know about him. I know he slips in enough stuff about women bad or commies bad or whatever, but the typical person googling him is just going to see lobsters and clean your room memes vs all these takedown attempts in psychologytoday or whatever, and get a little clownpilled from all the screeching about Nazis and what looks like a coordinated attempt to destroy someone who seems harmless. I suspect this was a big factor in his success. In particular, the pronouns thing he got big on is now years old, so continuing to bring it up like it was yesterday to try to destroy him isn't going to get much traction outside the true believer set.
I thought he was ridiculous even before I knew he sounded like Kermit, but I also enjoy the helpless floundering of his enemies, and respect that he seems to be legitimately helping people. Needing to be told to wash your penis and clean your room is sad, but not doing it is sadder still. His fate is unfortunate, but I'm glad it was his own hubris that destroyed him rather than yet another scalp taken by the screeching mob. Assuming he's actually gone, that is.
TL;DR I think his success is dependent on the anti-SJW thing, but he exploited it well, and has fed on it since. It's like he's renting out living space in his enemies' heads and collecting a tidy profit doing it.
* The Mythopoetic Men's Movement may be of interest to some here as a related phenomenon. They're still around here and there, but less of a footprint in the public consciousness than in the 80s.
I genuinely thought Peterson was going to transition.
I don't find his equivocation on religion that funny due to Jung, which unlike postmodernism or Marx he actually seems to understand. My personal theory is that either it's a habit he picked up during clinical practice as an atheist who believed faith was good for his patients, or he's more of of a deist/believes it in a mythological sense. Watching him squirm and ask people to "define transition" after having undergone one would be even better than watching him be eaten by the Dragon of Arrogance while he thinks he's fighting the Dragon of Addiction.
