People can promote a forgery while genuinely believing it, through self-persuasion.

Evidence

Was the archbishop a manipulator or was he being manipulated? To suggest that he might have been a promoter of the cause and not its passive victim is not necessarily to impute to him base motives. The human mind is at times adept at persuading itself that what ought to be true is. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1316

Categorization

• APHORISMS: ‘The human mind is at times adept at persuading itself that what ought to be true is’ reads as durable advice about self-deception in institutional actors.
• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone working on authenticity disputes in manuscript/artifact forgery studies — the manipulator-versus-victim false dichotomy.
• XREF: connects to: Anyone can counterfeit status symbols because signification inherently permits lying. — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 231