Mise
isle of lucy
This is incredibly close to what I believe. The bolded part especially. I've posted before about the folly of intelligence: smart people are incredibly skilled at justifying things and can form perfectly rational, logical arguments in favour of just about anything. It's for this reason that smart people often believe the stupidest things. You just have to look at climate change scepticism* or economics to see the level of stupidity that smart people are willing - and able - to justify. Worse still, smart people often find themselves to be in the right enough of the time to have an unwavering faith in their own rightness, and thus unwilling to challenge their own beliefs -- even when they're really god damn stupid.
Anyway, I probably conclude something different to you, though. My conclusion is simply that I can't trust myself: that there is probably some underlying, hidden motivation for my belief in X that I have to stop, take a step back, and figure out before I can commit to a position. Am I being selfish? Am I trying to be cool and edgy? Is there some deeper psychological need that my belief in X is satisfying? Do I want X to be true, and therefore seek out more and better justifications for X? If X wasn't true, would I be sad? Why do I need other people to believe X as well? This sort of self-criticism all depends on rational thought: it all depends on me trying to figure out -- rationally -- why I might believe what I believe. So there is a place for rationality, and that's in self-criticism. Rather than using rationality and intelligence solely to pick apart someone else's opinions, you use it on your own beliefs, to make sure you're believing what you believe for the right and best reasons, and not for all the wrong reasons.
*-you can see that scientific literacy is, if anything, positively correlated with climate scepticism among non-experts...: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v2/n10/full/nclimate1547.html
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