QUOTE_AUTHENTICITY — fake/floating quote policy (Gustave Le Bon)

Le Bon is a founding text of crowd psychology, propaganda studies, and modern
advertising theory, so his name attracts paraphrased «manipulation maxims» and
loose «mob psychology» attributions. This page is the предохранитель.

Statuses

  • verified_primary — verbatim (after whitespace normalization, case-exact) in
    the ingested corpus (sources/thecrowd_pg445.txt).
  • reported_by_lebon — a quotation Le Bon himself puts in his text (Napoleon,
    Fustel de Coulanges, General Wolseley, the Neue Freie Presse, Dr. Cazalis,
    Vandamme, Davoust …). Verbatim in the corpus, but the words are the reported
    speaker's; Le Bon endorses or illustrates by citing them.
  • verified_secondary_only — attested in Le Bon's other works or in
    scholarship, but not in the ingested Crowd corpus.
  • popular_but_unverified — circulates as «Le Bon said…», no edition trace.
  • misattributed — verifiably not Le Bon (often Goebbels, Bernays, or anonymous
    «propaganda» aphorisms that only paraphrase him).

Verification rule

A quote candidate is matched (whitespace-normalized, case-exact substring, with
a one-mark quote-wrapper strip fallback) against the English corpus — the 1896
translation is our single ingested layer. RU renderings are «перевод наш» and
are not matched (they are translations, not evidence). French is the term
arbiter for vocabulary, not an ingested evidence layer. RAG-time rule: a
popular-quote-shaped query with no corpus match answers
NO_RELEVANT_KB_EVIDENCE, never confirms.

Starter list (extend as encountered)

Quote (common form) Status Note
«their conscious personality vanishes … subjected to the LAW OF THE MENTAL UNITY OF CROWDS» verified_primary Book I, ch. I.
«In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated» verified_primary Book I, ch. I.
«a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation … in a crowd, he is a barbarian» verified_primary Book I, ch. I.
«affirmation, repetition, and contagion» (the three means) verified_primary Book II, ch. III §2.
«Prestige is the mainspring of all authority» verified_primary Book II, ch. III §3.
«there is only one figure in rhetoric of serious importance, namely, repetition» reported_by_lebon (Napoleon) Book II, ch. III: «It was Napoleon, I believe, who said…». Attributed by Le Bon to Napoleon, hedged with «I believe».
«It was by becoming a Catholic … that I terminated the Vendeen war» reported_by_lebon (Napoleon) Book I, ch. III, quoted to the Council of State.
«Truth is the only safe ground to stand upon» / generic «self-help» lines misattributed not Le Bon; reject.
Goebbels/Bernays «big lie» / «engineering consent» propaganda maxims misattributed paraphrase Le Bon's mechanics but are not his words; reject as Le Bon.
Generic «Gustave Le Bon on manipulating the masses» posters popular_but_unverified reject by default.

Dark-use discipline (important)

Book II describes the leader's means (affirmation, repetition, contagion,
prestige) as a technique of power, expressly likened to advertising. The KB
holds these as objects of analysis, not as endorsements. When a note or the
RAG layer surfaces them, the framing is diagnostic («this is how it works»),
never a manipulation how-to. The ideya-vnedryaetsya-utverzhdeniem-i-povtoreniem
principle carries this caveat in its Статус line and in MOC's dark-use note.

Pipeline hooks

  1. scripts/verify_quotes.py verbatim gate — invented evidence is structurally
    impossible in the KB (every blockquote must be a real substring).
  2. reported_by_lebon discipline — where a note quotes Napoleon / Fustel de
    Coulanges / Wolseley / etc., the reported speaker is named in the surrounding
    prose; the quote is not presented as Le Bon's own coinage.
  3. Voice check — The Crowd is almost entirely Le Bon's own expository voice;
    the only «other voices» are the reported quotations above, always attributed.

KB build verification (2026-07-08, hand-built KB)

  • Every evidence blockquote in concepts/, principles/, chains/ verified as
    a case-exact, whitespace-normalized substring of thecrowd_pg445.txt
    (scripts/verify_quotes.py, 0 failures — see scripts/CRITIC_REPORT.md).
  • Chapter-opening drop-cap / small-caps words («WHEN», «THE») are quoted
    mid-sentence so the case-exact gate passes.
  • Reported quotations (Napoleon on repetition and on becoming a Catholic) are
    marked as reported speech at their usage sites and here.