Sure we are. The issue isn't one of being "smart enough". It is about being aware what it going on inside your head, and purposefully setting up patterns to avoid traps. You might consider that, in fact, each of us is of two minds. They speak with the same voice, though, so it can be hard to distinguish them if you aren't careful.
The human brain has a set of structures collectively called the "limbic system". It is responsible for regulating your endocrine system, processing your response to emotional stimuli, and reinforcing behavior. For our purposes, you may consider this the "Oh sh*t, jaguar!" portion of your brain. It isn't precisely illogical, so much as it is based on getting you a fast response based on only small bits of information. When there is, in fact, a jaguar in the tall grass, you want the limbic system, as it gets you the fear response you need to rev up your adrenaline and get your feet moving. When there may be a jaguar, the cost of being wrong is small, compared to the value of being right, so the limbic response is useful and appropriate.
You also have structures in your brain that can process cold, clear logic very well. But they are glacially slow compared to the limbic system. By the time you have processed a rational response, the limbic system has already gotten its answer out there, and you're already acting on it.
Also relevant for our discussion - the limbic system does not differentiate between physical and social threats. Someone coming at you with a club is not all that different from a person about to cause you great loss of face, from the limbic standpoint.
Our collective problem being that there are very few jaguars any more. For modern life, we really want the reasoned response that is so often drowned out or colored by the limbic response. And, we can get it, but it takes practice to filter out the nonsense, and anyone can occasionally fail.
I'm not certain what you mean by logic here. If you mean "anything that isn't a reflex", well sure.
I'm talking about logic, like correct lines of reason from explicitly assumed facts following assumed correct rules resulting in a sound conclusion.
I know people who did PHDs in proof theory, where they try to make formal mathematical proofs to be
actually sound, and it is hard. Even in the strange atmosphere of formal mathematics, basically
everyone uses shortcuts and cheats with heuristics and skipping steps.
Sometimes those skipped steps are valid, and sometimes they are not.
Bubbling up from there, you can "rationally" decide X or Y, but that "rational" decision is at
best rationalized. Ie, you can produce a "rational justification" for your decision,
that decision wasn't made based off a logical deduction.
And, at
best, because your self image is "I am rational", someone else presenting an argument using the language of rationality will generate cognitive dissonance, and make you uncomfortable with your decision, and you might accept
their "rational justification" to change your behavior.
But you almost certainly
did not actually determine if their argument was actually sound or not, because I've seen what it actually takes to determine if a chain of logic is sound, and I don't believe you are doing that.
You
rationalized it was sound at best. You where convinced to build an argument to yourself in the language of rationality that justified your change of position.
Believing you are rational, and believing that rational argument can change your actions, means that you are predisposed to listen to arguments framed as rational, and if you ignore them you may experience cognitive dissonance. So it isn't
nothing. But it doesn't mean "your actions are based off cold, clear logic". Almost all of your actions are based off heuristics and feelings;
at best those heuristics and feelings can be modified by certain kinds of rational-language arguments and self discipline, and you can generate a plausible "rationalization" for your heuristics and feelings after the fact.
And even if you decided to turn your decision in an area into an algorithm -- say, take a bunch of resumes and score them using as close to objective criteria as you can, enter the results in a spreadsheet, and calculate points -- the criteria and calculation choices you make in turn aren't going to be based off pure cold logic almost certainly. And if they are, then the base for those in turn won't be based off pure cold logic.
Actually building a pure cold logic chain to make even the simplest decision in the most constrained environment is insanely hard. And what you get out of it isn't "this is true", but a conditional claim which you have to use heuristics to map over to "pretty much true", like "assuming model X is consistent, and my association between the formal symbols and what I consider counting numbers is sound, then there is an infinite number of primes".
So no, nobody is smart enough to do that for their actions. You can use the self image of "rationality" to iterate on your heuristics and feelings, but the cost of actually making decisions and acting on pure logic is crazy.
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This does mean it is possible to reason a person out of a position they did not come to by reason,
if they consider themselves to be reasonable. But it isn't easy, because every rational reason-based argument you have ever made is full of holes, because every such argument is full of holes. And the ones that aren't are so large that you can't hold them in your head all at once,
and contain things that aren't holes that look like holes.
Rational arguments are arguments some people are predisposed to listen to. Agreeing on the value of Rational arguments can be done
without believing that you are rational.
The problem with believing you are rational is that it means your actions are rational, which can sort of excuse you from being responsible for your actions. Engineers disease is when you are an expert in one area, and you hold "I'm smart, so my decisions must be right and rational" once you convince yourself of something (often outside of your area of expertise).
Ie, the trap can look like this: As a rational person, your rational decision that racism isn't real (or whatever) is rational. And as a smart person, your rational belief is more right than others. People arguing the other side just aren't as smart and rational as you.
If you instead decide "I am not rational", believe that you should listen to rational arguments in order to improve yourself, but accept that many of your actions aren't going to be rational. When someone comes at you with a poisonous rational argument, you can explicitly know "there is a danger in exposing my OODA loop, and this person might be attacking me with this", and try to avoid the trap.
For example, if someone gave me an unassailable rational argument to do something particularly horrible, I wouldn't judge it only on the soundness of the argument. I'd consider the possibility my ability to understand the argument is imperfect (because I'm not a cold logic machine, and I as a human suck at it), and consider the possibility that someone is weaponizing rational arguments against me.
