Strategy

Why You Should Believe in Spiritual Attacks — and Why You Don’t

Read to the End. The Best Part Is Near the End — and It's Going to Sting.

Published May 2, 2026 · By Nassar Taleb · © 2026 All rights reserved

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Why You Should Believe in Spiritual Attacks — and Why You Don’t

The average straight man is so ignorant about metaphysical matters that it borders on the clinically bizarre. That’s not rhetorical exaggeration — it’s a diagnosis. And I’m going to tell you, with the cold precision of someone who has interviewed spiritual leaders in Brazil, the United States, Morocco, Panama, Portugal, Spain, and across North Africa, exactly what I found. My hands tremble as I write this — not from fear, but from a deep and productive rage at male ignorance. That’s precisely why I do this work.

Let’s get into it.

The Three Archetypes of Male Ignorance

I have a friend who practices Kardecism — a spiritualist tradition rooted in 19th-century French philosophy that believes in communicating with spirits of the dead. He works at a spiritist center. He “talks to spirits.” And he doesn’t believe that spiritual attacks work. This is the same friend who, at the beginning of my first book, told me with full conviction that his wife had only been with “3 men before him.”

I have another friend — a doctor, highly intelligent — who always falls back on the classic line: “These things can only affect you if your vibration is low.” And a third, a successful entrepreneur, who says with chest-puffed pride: “I don’t believe in that stuff. My father didn’t either.”

Three archetypes. Three different ways of saying the same thing: I don’t want to know.

Before I continue, let me dismantle the doctor’s argument once and for all: do you personally know any living, breathing Jesus-level human being who manages to maintain a “high vibration” while navigating real life — meaning traffic, utility bills, an ex, and a terrible boss? No. Then the argument collapses before it even leaves your mouth.

You Can’t See It. But It Exists.

First things first: there are far more things you cannot see or feel than your imagination can reach — even if you had an IQ of 250, which you obviously don’t.

Light waves. Radio waves. Bacteria. Viruses. Oxygen molecules. The communication between Earth and the Mars rovers happens through radio waves — invisible, inaudible, but absolutely real and functional. Your body contains more microorganisms than human cells — you are, literally, less “you” than you think. There is more empty space inside your cells than solid matter. You are a dynamic organism where most of what you are is physical “nothingness.” All of this has been proven. For a long time.

And yet you don’t believe in metaphysical things. Why? I’ll explain with surgical precision.

Why You Don’t Believe: The Five Real Reasons

1. Male biology is wired toward the external. The penis is an exposed, external organ. The vagina is the opposite. Men only go to the doctor when there’s external evidence — pain that’s palpable, visible, undeniable. Women go when they suspect something. Men are structurally built to value what they perceive through the five senses, and that has always been evolutionarily useful: hunting, building shelter, providing. Testosterone intensifies this pattern — the same thing happens with other mammals. Neutering cats completely changes their behavior. You’re not as different as you think.

2. The mainstream conditioned you to stay this way. Dominant social frameworks have educated men, since childhood, to value the external and the tangible — because that’s useful: provision, strength, skill. When parents enroll their sons in martial arts, or when boys compete for dominance, they are serving — through both biology and conditioning — the interests of the gender that matters most for species perpetuation. This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a system.

3. The world is too competitive for you to break paradigms. You already have to work, pay bills, maintain relationships, take care of your body, grow professionally. Spending mental energy to discover new things — and to break deep-seated beliefs — is a luxury your brain unconsciously refuses. So you simply say you don’t believe, without investigating. This energy-saving mechanism is automatic, the same way you never question how you brush your teeth every morning.

4. The mainstream minimizes what spiritual manipulation actually does. Remember that old show I Dream of Jeannie? The woman manipulates her “clueless husband” constantly, but everything ends in happy laughter. Or that movie with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman — Nicole at the peak of her beauty — about spells that involve death, presented in a soft, romantic, almost enchanting way. With that Bullock smile, how could it possibly be evil? The mainstream doesn’t deny these practices exist. It romanticizes them. And romanticizing is the most efficient way to neutralize a threat.

5. You were structurally built not to believe. Biologically and culturally. And that serves the female gender. But it doesn’t serve you — individually, as a man.

Why You Should Believe: The Five Reasons That Will Bother You

1. Science only validates what has already happened — and where there’s financial interest. You already knew this. Before any experimental proof, there are theories. The Theory of Relativity worked that way. But there are real experiences that would never pass through the filter of conventional science — the human being itself, for example. Statistically, the probability of the human species existing today, given Earth’s geological and biological history, is practically zero. So when you say “I only believe in what’s scientifically proven,” you’re proudly declaring: I take great pleasure in being ignorant and I want to stay that way. In the case of spiritual attacks, that position doesn’t serve you. But it serves women — up to a point, meaning until these things come back around to them (which can take years or centuries, so don’t count on “divine timing” to save you).

2. Read Ian Stevenson. Try to refute him. No one would have enough creativity to invent what is documented in his work — not even Tolkien. Ian Stevenson was a professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia who documented over 3,000 cases of children with verifiable memories of past lives. Try to refute his research with academic rigor. You won’t be able to. Breaking beliefs hurts. It’s visceral. It’s worse than finding out your idol is nothing like you always imagined.

Note: Chico Xavier was a Brazilian medium who psychographed over 400 books across completely different themes and styles. His work remains one of the most documented and studied cases in spiritualist literature.

3. Apparently harmless spiritual rituals have a deeply negative foundation. When you inexplicably can’t stop thinking about someone, it’s possible that person has done something. The few genuinely clean energetic-spiritual manipulations are those aimed at healing illness or generically “clearing paths.” Love-binding spells are a cancer on humanity. One day you’ll find out that the attractive woman from the gym did a binding on you, and your ego will feel flattered. Don’t fall for that trap.

By “binding” you — as the name literally implies — the person is attempting, and often succeeding, to dull your mind to other possibilities that would be better for you. But the worst part you still don’t know: this type of manipulation doesn’t just damage your romantic and sexual life. It damages every other area — including your finances.

A few years ago, I discovered that a 9/10 woman from my gym — a doctor — was doing a binding ritual on me. Researching it, I realized the work was interfering with my finances, even though she hadn’t formally requested that. I called a friend of mine who is a practitioner — at the time I still didn’t have solid knowledge on the subject — and asked, half furious: “These spirits, these entities, don’t they know how to do the job right? Why are they messing with my finances if the ritual was supposed to be a love binding?”

He calmly replied: “That’s not how it works. In attack rituals like these, it’s generally not a trained, experienced spirit — it’s a lost soul, one that in life only caused harm. It receives part of the offering and goes to you to carry out the objective, but it drags along a ton of spiritual debris. It’s roughly like a homeless person who enters your house to have dinner with the family. The goal is dinner. But in the process, he dirties the house, trashes the bathroom, leaves everything smelling bad, breaks dishes, spits in your face.”

Understood? A binding isn’t romance. It’s an attack.

4. Attractive women do far more of this than you imagine. It’s easy to verify: frequent the places where these rituals are practiced and you’ll see that the overwhelming majority of those present are women — and that’s not an impression, it’s structural data. But there’s something counterintuitive I put in my first book that you’ve never considered: attractive women do far more of this than other women. The reason is simple — an attractive woman is not used to dealing with adversity in her interactions with men. When she encounters a man who is genuinely difficult to control or of high value, she resorts to what she knows best: manipulation in all its forms, including the ones you can’t see.

5. Everything I discovered is on record. Every conversation, interview, and research session I conducted with spiritual leaders and oracle practitioners is recorded in audio — in both Brazilian Portuguese and American English. I will soon convert this content, without revealing names or sensitive information, into some form of media. Audio, text, probably both. I can guarantee one thing: 100% of men will be shocked. And 1000% of attractive women will be furious that I’m exposing their behavior.

What to Do With This

I’m not asking you to become a spiritualist, attend rituals, or light candles. I’m asking something far simpler and far harder: stop dismissing what you don’t understand as if ignorance were a virtue.

The man who proudly says “I don’t believe in that stuff” is the same man who walks into a minefield without a map because he thinks landmines are superstition. The field doesn’t care about your beliefs. The mine explodes anyway.

You may not believe that spiritual attacks work. But if they do — and the evidence suggests they do, to varying degrees — you are navigating unarmed in a game where the other side has a full arsenal and you don’t even know you’re playing.

This isn’t mysticism. It’s strategy.


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