He’s not entirely wrong there, he’s talking about the categorical ideas that exist within the ecosystem of our history of memes, our stories, and thus our cognition. The legitimacy of Peterson’s career in academia was built on rehashing Joseph Campbell’s work on the monomyth. What he’s talking about is the congruency behind ideas and how they work together. “It makes sense that a witch lives in a swamp,” If I tell you a fictional story about a witch living in a swamp, it wouldn’t require much background for you accept it, right? I wouldn’t have to give some long string of anecdotes of how she ended up there. That’s because the history of our stories and what you’ve probably consumed does the work for me. We have a shared culture of meme experiences of witches with pointy hats out in the middle of the woods.

Peterson’s sin, in this realm (there are plenty others outside of it), is that he takes things that exist as metaphors for understanding how we internally process our thoughts and feelings and “factually” applies them to other people in the real world as broad categories. Like his whole “woman as chaos” shtick; He’s taking an archetypal metaphor for our internal chaos, that one should be using for self-inspection, and projecting it out on to people in the world like a fucking solipsist.