My best current take on this is to use psychedelics, and the ’60s upheavals in general, as a lens through which to gain insight into the rise and entrenchment of leftist postmodernism in the humanities. Social constructionism, and the vision of the world as a series of shifting ‘texts’ conditioned by conventions and political power struggles, seems analogous in some ways to states of psychedelic revelation in which all habitual structures liquify, and the forces that constitute the world seem to be rooted more in thought than in the usually solid realm of material reality. Such revelations are incredibly important, containing great potential for both delusion and liberation. But if you don’t ‘come down’ properly, the revelation can be wasted. You can get stuck there in a way that impedes effective social functioning, or perhaps react with terror, and flee into the rigidities of madness or convention (or both, as R.D. Laing might have pointed out). Now, in some sense we might see that the world of critical theory has failed to ‘come down’ from its revelations (though I suspect that there are many voices in the mix, below the radar of conservative ridicule and outrage, which have integrated very well with ‘harder’ counter-narratives emerging from the study of evolution and genetics). At the same time, snarling opposition such as Peterson’s is probably counter-productive in terms of integrating these revelations, like a well-meaning but narrow-minded parent berating you on the perils of drug use when you’re trying to piece things together after an acid trip.