This is because the auxiliary structure absorbs the impact, recontextualizes it, and reinforces the core through cognitive dissonance.

The network, once established, becomes self-sealing.

Over time, these scaffold a more central fixation, such as the belief that an election was stolen, that vaccines are genocidal, or that a secret cabal rules the world.

As Dielenberg notes, attempts to attack the core fixation head-on often fail—or worse, backfire.

Instead, it cultivates auxiliary beliefs: distrust of institutions, feelings of grievance, personal vulnerability, in-group solidarity.

The result is not simply a false belief, but a cognitively locked-in system—a fixation network.

These networks are built from the outside in.

Rarely does a disinformation campaign attempt to convince someone directly of its core claim.

The goal is to seed ideas that bypass critical reasoning and nest into the cognitive infrastructure as fixations.

This is achieved through emotionally charged repetition, symbolic saturation, identity alignment, and social reinforcement.

dismissive about the fact that we don't have enough air traffic controller, and are going through a period of unprecedented loss of life and property as a result, is perfectly in character. It's the triumph of appearance over substance.

To fight disinformation effectively, we must stop imagining we are correcting errors.

We are, instead, contending with an enemy that understands the human need for certainty, pattern, and purpose—and uses that need to install software into the mind.

Just as religious conversion rarely begins with theology but with doubt in a peripheral belief, disinformation deconversion may begin with soft disruption at the edge.

Dielenberg’s theory may offer predictive power: identifying critical periods of vulnerability (e.g., during crises), populations with high fixation densities, and fixation “load-bearing nodes” within narrative ecosystems.

Identity-sensitive messaging, counter-narrative rituals, and slow emotional disengagement may prove more effective than truth-bombing.

Effective counter-disinformation strategies must take fixation architecture seriously. Rather than attacking core beliefs, they should aim to weaken auxiliary fixations—interrupting the emotional rhythms, social reinforcements, and symbolic triggers that hold the network together

This is why debunking rarely works. Facts don’t dissolve fixations. They must be displaced, not denied.

What emerges from this synthesis is a grimly elegant model of cognitive capture.

Disinformation does not spread because it is convincing—it spreads because it exploits how the brain needs to fixate to function.

They begin with plausible auxiliary hooks—masks are uncomfortable, voting software is flawed, experts can be wrong—and slowly construct hardened networks of belief that are immune to contradiction.

susceptibility to projection.

This is not theoretical.

Disinformation campaigns surrounding COVID-19, the U.S. election system, the war in Ukraine, and globalist conspiracy theories have all relied on fixation engineering.

Through a combination of contradictory messaging, symbolic confusion, emotional overload, and selectively truthful claims, reflexive control exploits the same vulnerabilities Dielenberg describes—over-reliance on core fixations, failure to revise in light of new data, and

I'm not talking about a make busy group planning for what we'll do after the midterms. Right now we're staring at war - either with Venezuela/Mexico/Greenland, or within the states. Or both. What is the plan to deal with this?