Convincing yourself that your ideas are right is a low bar. The key part of doing science is convincing yourself that your ideas are wrong. It's about telling the difference between actually discovering something new and making mistakes in experiments and reasoning. If you fail to convince yourself, you ask others to convince you that your ideas are wrong. If they also fail, you are starting to build a consensus that maybe you have actually discovered something.
Believing in something that contradicts the consensus is politics. Building a consensus among experts who are skeptical but open to new ideas is science.
The problem is one of confusion. There are at least three distinct things that we call science. Primus, the social enterprise itself. This is where “consensus” applies. Secundus, the method for understanding the rules governing the system of the world. This is where what you call “low level” activities are. Tertius, the body of accepted knowledge that’s been ascertained. Unfortunately, this doesn’t necessarily follow from the scientific method. Sometimes it instead follows from the needs of the social enterprise of science, which we rather clumsily call politics.
It’s only by clearly and distinctly considering these three concepts that we can avoid frankly intellectually crippling confusion.
This is scientistry, not science. Science works on observation and experiment. In a perfect world perhaps consensus would be established scientifically, but that’s observably at odds with the history of science.