Though they almost all cling to some sort of obvious error or set of errors, many people are at least minimally intelligent enough to realize that some sort of autonomy is necessary to have real knowledge, or else objecting to just believing things because others do would not be as popular a thing to condemn even among those who are not even close to understanding its full ramifications. Liberals and conservatives, atheists and theists, and Christians and Muslims alike might generally at least talk as if they affirm this objective truth. All the same, very few people are ever able to realize that rationalistic autonomy is not about believing in things because of subjective preference or random thoughts as opposed to groupthink. It is about looking to the objective truths of reason while avoiding random, inconsistent, unverifiable, and preference-driven beliefs even if the only person involved in the reflection is oneself (and reason is not a mind-dependent, subjective thing at all, so an autonomous thinker is not relying solely on their own mind anyway).
There is nothing rational about autonomous thinking that is not in alignment with reason, where ideas are assumed, random or incompatible ideas are embraced, and no actual attempt is made to avoid fallacies. Appeals to popularity and thought that is helplessly prompted or forgone in accordance with social whims are asinine, but even autonomous thinking is dead apart from sheer rationality. Yes, some autonomy is an inherent part of rationality, but autonomy alone does not make someone rational or the ideas they believe true. It is impossible to understand various logical truths and experiences without having directly contemplated them on one's own, whether or not they are things one could think of without sensory prompting and whether or not one actually did so. There is just more to genuine autonomy and rationality than this.
Any person that does not look strictly to reason as the source of absolute certainty, the ultimate revealer and grounding of all truths (even if other epistemological and metaphysical factors are connected with some issues), no matter how little they are concerned with others and how philosophically autonomous they are, is thoroughly irrational, just in a different way from the person who thinks nothing can be known apart from social prompting or who thinks that consensus and conversation literally reveal truth epistemologically or make something true metaphysically. A rational person looks to reason itself, avoiding the erroneous stupidity of looking to either their personal perceptions and preferences or the claims of others as the basis of truth and epistemology.
Whatever random ideas they might otherwise leap to without logical proof do not make someone intelligent, deep, or anything but as ignorantly reliant on logical axioms as the collectivist thinker they might rightly look down on. This is not because seeking out the broadest consensus to agree with it or thinking that social interactions are a necessity for philosophical discovery and reflection. If anything, even the random, irrational kind of autonomous thought is still less erroneous than this, if only because it is a perversion of the objective fact that the only person's mind one can inherently know is one's own and this is still ironically closer to autonomously reflecting on ideas without assumptions or constant social prompting. However, both approaches and the fallacies behind them are still inherently contrary to reality.
The truth is still that no one has to choose between one of two or more philosophical errors. It is always possible to forsake all assumptions and thus avoid any epistemological error, even believing in something true and logically verifiable without actually recognizing the logical proof for it, and any inherent error, such as contradictory, self-refuting ideas that could not possibly be true no matter what. Two irrational, untrue philosophical concepts are still untrue regardless of whether one of them is more or less irrational than the other. Identifying and rejecting multiple errors is within everyone's reach, with the only real problems being unwillingness and a voluntary lack of alignment with reason, the set of necessary truths on which all stands and comes to light.
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