He is intelligent - he is not particularly knowledgeable about many of the things he spouts off about. He frequently leaves major components of any given equation out of the mix when it doesn't serve his narrative. As I already pointed out elsewhere, an example of this is his assertion that if we don't socially enforce monogamy, it will lead to chaos and social disruption. This is because Peterson equates polygamy (one men with many wives) with things like polyamory, where all persons involved have equal opportunity to have multiple partners. What he says sounds intelligent, until you take into consideration all the parts that he omitted from the picture - which is just one of the reasons why he is a pseudo-intellectual. Most of what he says is a smart-sounding veneer for what are essentially emotional impulses.
"But, having examined Peterson’s work closely, I think the “misinterpretation” of Peterson is only partially a result of leftists reading him through an ideological prism. A more important reason why Peterson is “misinterpreted” is that he is so consistently vague and vacillating that it’s impossible to tell what he is “actually saying.” People can have such angry arguments about Peterson, seeing him as everything from a fascist apologist to an Enlightenment liberal, because his vacuous words are a kind of Rorschach test onto which countless interpretations can be projected.
Peterson is popular partly because he criticizes social justice activists in a way many people find satisfying, and some of those criticisms have merit. He is popular partly because he offers adrift young men a sense of heroic purpose, and offers angry young men rationalizations for their hatreds. And he is popular partly because academia and the left have failed spectacularly at helping make the world intelligible to ordinary people, and giving them a clear and compelling political vision."
Read the rest of this very insightful article about just why Peterson is, in fact, a pseudo-intellectual.
