people think they think, but it is not true
Page 241 people think they think, but it is not true. It’s mostly South criticism that passes for thinking. True thinking is rare – just like true listening. Thinking it’s listening to yourself. It is difficult. To think, you have to be at least two people at the same time. Then you have to let those people disagree. Thinking is an internal dialogue between two or more different views of the world .
— from Who Is Flying (Self, Nature & Nurture)
In the book
Erich Fromm noticed that people are their own slave drivers, lashing themselves harder than any master would dare. Most of what we proudly call "thinking" about ourselves is not thinking at all — it is just self-criticism wearing the costume of honesty. And the worst of it is that we feed the wrong voice: we rehearse every failure and ignore the one voice worth amplifying, the one that reminds us of all we have actually managed and become. — Who Is Flying (Self, Nature & Nurture)
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." — F. Scott Fitzgerald (Sample epigraph — or use one of your own; you said it sharply in, that people think they think, but mostly it is just self-criticism passing for thought.) In the last chapter we met the pilot. […] We seem to start out almost perfect, a clean seed of possibility, and then the mind busily develops a thousand ingenious ways to mislead itself. And here is the part that should make you sit up: most of what we proudly call thinking is not thinking at all — it is mostly self-criticism wearing the costume of thought. [Here, tell them about a time your own mind flew you straight into a mountain — a thing you were utterly certain of that turned out to be false, and what it cost before you saw it.] — The Mind in the Cockpit