Any particular work you'd point to? Extending this to Shosta as well. I wanna see what it was that blew your mind, if you don't mind me boiling the pathos down to something so pithy. 
No hour(s)-long videos, please. Not unless there's a transcript.
pls read this whole thing. I hate boring people and like to keep things short but I'm opening up quite a bit here.
Some background: I'm an uneducated person. I don't have a lot of exposure to philosophy. So for instance, I used to think Nietzsche invented Nihilism and that was just what he believed. Didn't know anything about Jung, even though we covered a little bit of him in my literature class in highschool. So because Jordan Peterson is primarily a professor of psychology, and a pretty good one, and also an engaging public speaker, he's got all these full length psychology courses uploaded onto Youtube, many of which (like the course on personality) are really fascinating in their own right but even more so because (like any great professor will do) intersperses or combines the content with useful or thought provoking additions. (Good example that comes to mind was his lecture on disgust as a basic emotion that arises from conscientiousness and shows how conservatism is like a sociological immune system which would literally keep people safe from disease. He expands on this by demonstrating the reliance on disease and purification as a metaphor in Nazi Germany and then capstones the lecture with the
Parasite Stress Hypothesis, which is that the prevalence of infectious diseases in a region is a strong predictor for the emergence of authoritarian governments.) And he'll do this while also integrating moral philosophy (as it arises from basic psychological study) and namedropping philosophers and ideas. So in this way he really is the stupid man's smart man but that's actually quite the compliment in my opinion because he's exposed me to stuff I never would have discovered otherwise.
That's like 60% of what he does. But the stuff that straight-shook-me-breh was his bible lectures. Etiolate's right about this: since he's a long form presenter and some of the ideas are pretty involved (not complex, mind you, just consisting of a lot of steps) you're not going to get a good "bite sized summary" but I can try to tell you what got me.
Here's the one video I want you to watch. You can just listen to 30-45 minutes of it but I'd like you to at least give it that much.
The short of it: JP was really enamored with Jung's idea of the collective unconscious. The fact that there are archetypes that recur across all of human mythology and dreams was proof that most people share a deep underlying psychology, and this represented a kind of accumulated knowledge developed over hundreds of millions of years of evolution. If you think about information, there's the set of all the stuff we don't know or understand, and then there's all the knowledge we can articulate because we speak and have language, but in between the two there's knowledge that we know and act out but can't articulate (as simple as jumping away from snakes or as complex as someone is lying to us or the insecurity that we think we're frauds in our work).
And people who write stories or make music or paint paintings watch people, over time, sort of like long-exposure photography, and re-represent those behaviors in their work after having distilled it through their own psychologies, thus encoding that fundamental knowledge about humanity in their work, which is why archetypes can be observed at all. So they're basically like mystics or seers, sitting on the boundary of knowledge and relaying that information back to normal society. Which is why we value art at all, you know, because it teaches people about themselves, and anyone who's been touched by art knows that deep down.
And so Jordan takes that idea and says, well, the Bible is thousands of years old, and the joint work of hundreds, maybe thousands of people who have changed it incrementally over time, and it's like the ultimate mythology which has underscored western civilization. And since that's true, it's probably worth deconstructing for its collective observations about humankind. And they're not just observations, actually. They really represent truths about us in a profound way, in the sense that they contain fairly sophisticated theses about the nature of human
consciousness, and
individuality, and
morality, much in the same way that something like the hero's journey represents the personal struggle against a crisis and the eventual rebirth and reconstitution of the psyche. So they're metaphysical truths.
What was it in this for me that blew my mind? Fucking everything, dude. Stream incoming: I'm a materialist, atheist, hedonist, moral relativist. I don't care about religion. Knowledge for me is hard empirical science. I'd never considered before that mythology or literature of all things could be a source of knowledge, or that truth could be encoded in every single one of us literally in our DNA or reflected through society, which is some crazy Spinoza-level monism. Just saying something like "artists are mystics" is straight up new age nonsense I would have never said before but here I am saying it. And never had I considered there to be a universal human morality because, you know, that's not self evident at all, especially when you don't believe in God, it's everything goes, man, but here I am now believing in a universal morality determined and discovered by evolution itself and baked right into our social structures and laws. And I never considered that ideologies of all kinds, like political ones especially but even stuff as simple as environmentalism and veganism, were primitive unsophisticated religions and rituals that replaced Christianity as a sophisticated value system, because we are hardwired to codify and act out and ahdere to value systems by virtue of being social creatures. Here I am saying I'm not religious and
yet I'm revering Mother Earth just like a Wiccan would. And in the psychological lectures, you know, the idea that liberals and conservatives are just people of different biologically pre-determined psychological temperaments that serve
important sociological purpose blows my mind too. It's one thing to respect other (common) political views because you're "nice" and "empathetic", which is arbitrary and takes some training, it's another thing entirely when the entire success of your society has been predicated on the interdependence of the full diversity of the personality spectrum and everyone needs everyone else or else society falls apart and dies. My whole goddamned worldview has been turned upside down in the span of a few hours of cumulative videos and it's affected my entire identity to its core.
So in short, Peterson tells the story of
why we are through psychology, literature, and evolution. He offers people a positive, constructive philosophy of
what to do informed by history, humanism, rationalism, and individuality (and this is so much different from everything I'd ever learned, which was negative and tore things down, for good reasons of course, like post-structuralism, and atheism, and moral relativism). And he advocates for
an intentional society, which preserves the good stuff in the old value structure (traditionalism, perhaps?), and deepens and develops it for the future (because God is dead but we still need values or else communism kills 100 million people). And it's not surprising to me at all that hungrynoob had a fucking religious experience because of this guy. People are so hungry for this stuff, in our cold, dead, rational world. And they want answers for who they are and what they should do, because nobody's telling them, and there's so much power in a positive and human centric philosophy that doesn't require a tyrant living in the sky. And I can honestly say I felt the exact same thing.
