The Diagnosis
Should you trust your mechanic?
The Diagnosis
By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com
Prologue — The Goose
I had just earned my California Teaching Credential from UCSB. My wife and I piled into our 1962 Chevy Impala — a big white four-door we called The Goose — and set out to see what our future might be. I had a few teaching interviews in Northern California and almost no money to get there.
Somewhere in the East Bay, the engine began making a rhythmic pounding sound. Power dropped. Hope followed. We limped into a Firestone shop, where three men in red shirts gathered around like doctors in a bad movie. Within thirty seconds, the lead mechanic gave his confident verdict: “You’ll need a full engine rebuild.”
That wasn’t an option. We had no credit cards, no budget, and no time. Down the street, I found a small independent auto parts store. The man at the counter told me to drive around back and talk to their mechanic. He was under a car, slid out, wiped his hands, and told me to start the engine. He listened for ten seconds, laid his hand on the valve cover, and said, “Broken rocker arm — probably right under my hand.”
Ten minutes, ten dollars, and one greasy sleeve later, The Goose purred like new.
That was the day I learned to distrust confident experts with financial incentives. The ones who profit from your panic will always find something catastrophic to fix.
I. The Pandemic of Incentives
When the world began to panic in 2020, the same rule applied. The more money that flowed into fear, the more fear the world was shown. The new priests didn’t wear red shirts — they wore lab coats and microphones. The product was certainty. The price was freedom.
The PCR test became the perfect instrument for this new economy of dread. A machine that could amplify invisible traces of life until it found what it needed to justify the next headline, the next lockdown, the next policy. The more it cycled, the more it found. The more it found, the more the machine was fed.
No villainy required. Just incentives.
Bob: “You don’t need a conspiracy when everyone’s getting paid to misunderstand.”
II. The Feedback Loop
Fear, once monetized, becomes self-replicating. One data point begets another, one graph feeds another broadcast. Experts learn that the surest way to keep their seat at the table is to keep the problem unsolved.
Each player believed he was doing good — the lab technician running one more sample, the governor extending one more order, the journalist writing one more urgent headline. Nobody needed to be corrupt; they just needed to be rewarded.
It was the same machine, running on new oil.
III. The Perfect System
A good system doesn’t need villains. It needs habits.
The habit of trusting the diagnosis.
The habit of mistaking precision for truth.
The habit of letting fear set the price.
Soon, “cases” replaced “patients,” “data” replaced “experience,” and “trust the science” became the prayer of the panicked. The economy stalled, small businesses closed, and elections quietly reshaped themselves under the banner of emergency.
And nobody meant for it to happen. That’s what makes it work.
Bob: “They said it was science. I say it was sales.”
IV. The Hidden Arithmetic
Follow the incentives.
Fear funds the data.
Data funds the policy.
Policy funds the power.
Power funds the fear.
That’s the loop. No dark room required, no secret plan. Just a feedback circuit where every good intention becomes another excuse to keep the engine running.
Once the fear machine is humming, you can drive it anywhere — through the economy, through education, through elections — and nobody dares touch the off switch.
V. The Mechanic and the Lesson
The Goose taught me something I didn’t forget. When incentives and authority meet, truth gets priced out. Firestone wasn’t evil; it was efficient. Experts don’t need to lie when their paychecks depend on the same story.
That’s what the world learned — or should have — in those years. Every chart, every emergency order, every televised moral command came with the same built-in bias: the mechanic who gets paid by the rebuild.
When the cost of being wrong is nothing, the temptation to stay wrong is everything.
Bob: “You can’t fix what pays better broken.”
VI. The Moment of Clarity
You don’t forget the sound of an engine running right again — that hum after chaos. It’s not relief; it’s recognition. You realize it was never that complicated. The fix was simple. The racket was profitable.
That’s the story — not of a car, not even of a virus, but of a civilization that stopped checking under the hood. We outsourced judgment to people who sell repairs.
The next time the experts tell you the whole system needs rebuilding, find the independent mechanic. Odds are, it’s just a rocker arm.
VII. What If We Speculated?
Here’s where we have some fun.
We now understand the mechanism: a cascading series of dire warnings, new laws, stern accusations, alarming graphs, and solemn declarations—each feeding the next until panic looked like policy.
But why did it happen in the first place? And why then—at that precise moment in time?
Why did the early reports of the “pandemic” omit the obvious—that it almost exclusively claimed the old and frail?
Why was there such a furious effort to deny that the virus came from a lab, not a wet market?
Why did no one test the masks, or question the “six-foot rule” that had no scientific basis?
Why were schools shut down when children were never in real danger?
Why were churches closed while bars stayed open?
Why were masks required when you walked into a restaurant, and then miraculously not required when you sat down to eat?
In a lifetime of solving difficult technical problems, I’ve learned a useful shortcut:
Go to the end result and work backward.
It usually tells you exactly why things unfolded as they did.
So what was the end result?
Joe Biden—who ran a campaign with almost no vital signs—was elected President of the United States by the largest number of votes in history.
Could it be that simple?
Bob: “The PCR tests worked,” he said. “Just not the way they told you. They weren’t measuring the virus—they were measuring compliance.”