THEORETICAL OBSERVATORY

The Expulsive Model: From Planetary Biology to Creative Genius (20-07-2025)

What if we freed ourselves from the anthropocentric illusion that makes us believe we are active agents in the grand drama of biological existence? The truth might be harsher and, at the same time, more fascinating: we are all— from California’s sequoias to intestinal bacteria— products of a gigantic expulsion process that the planet triggers when its guts become overfilled beyond tolerance. Think of that pimple that surfaces on your face before an important date—not because it decides to appear to ruin your evening, but because your skin can no longer contain the buildup of sebum, bacteria, and cellular debris fermenting deep in the epidermal layers. When the tension becomes unbearable, the organism finds the shortest way out and pushes that infected mass out, creating the lump you so dislike. Now multiply this mechanism across the entire planet: the Earth is a vast organism that continuously accumulates solar energy, organic decomposition, chemical reactions, tectonic movements; and when these processes reach critical thresholds of concentration, the Earth system is forced to rid itself of them through the expulsion of living forms. The tree you see growing in the park is not “growing” in the romantic sense of the word—it is literally being shot out of the ground like a biological projectile charged with all the geochemical energy amassed underground. Its roots are forcibly everted by the concentration of mineral nutrients seeking dispersion through drainage channels. The trunk rising toward the sky does not follow a noble heliotropic impulse but obeys the physical laws of hydrostatic pressure pushing sap upward to lighten the tension building in the root tissues. The leaves that open to the sun are not intelligent solar panels but venting surfaces through which excess photosynthetic energy can finally evaporate into the atmosphere, preventing the plant system’s implosion. This expulsive dynamic governs every biological manifestation with an implacable logic that admits no romantic or teleological exceptions. When two gametes fuse to create an embryo, we are not witnessing the miracle of life blooming but the inevitable consequence of the accumulation of genetic information, which has reached an extremely high density inside the egg cell and must necessarily be discharged by constructing a complex organism. Even human behavior, in its most sophisticated manifestations, is merely a refined form of tension discharge. When you speak, write, play an instrument, make love, laugh, or cry, you are simply releasing neurochemical excesses accumulated in your brain that need outflow channels to avoid synaptic overload. The evolution of species loses all halo of purposeful progress to reveal itself as a succession of genetic explosions triggered by increasing instability of hereditary material. When DNA accumulates mutations beyond its self-correcting capacity, the only way out is the expulsion of organismic variants functioning as safety valves for excess genetic information. Natural selection does not reward the fittest but simply allows the survival of the most efficient expulsive configurations in draining evolutionary pressure. Mass extinctions do not represent random catastrophes but systemic rebalancing moments during which the planet massively discards biological accumulations unsustainable for the global energy economy. We are not the protagonists of the evolutionary drama but symptoms of planetary imbalances seeking compensation through our temporary existence. Biodiversity is not wealth in itself but an index of environmental instability: the richer an ecosystem is in species, the more it evidences the system’s need to multiply discharge channels to manage energy accumulations beyond tolerance limits.

But it is in the phenomenon of creative genius that this expulsive logic reveals its most extraordinary and paradoxical manifestation. Genius represents the extreme consequence of that very principle pushing the tree out of the soil and the pimple through the epidermis, applied however to the sphere of human experience and symbolic production. Here we must make a fundamental distinction that dismantles centuries of terminological confusion: the common artist is an expression craftsman, a skilled worker who masters consolidated techniques, applies compositional rules learned in academies, and produces works following aesthetic canons codified by tradition. Their brain functions like an efficient but limited processor, capable of manipulating preexisting symbolic materials without ever reaching critical densities of experiential accumulation. The artist works by subtraction, eliminating excess to achieve balanced and recognizable forms, always operating within neurological safety parameters that allow control over the creative process. Genius, instead, is a completely different biological phenomenon: a nervous system that has reached a very high capacity for experiential accumulation, becoming a receptacle for massive amounts of stimuli, sensations, traumas, and environmental input that generate expulsive pressures of extraordinary intensity, exceeding all normal thresholds of containment. While the artist consciously chooses what and how to express, the genius undergoes the expulsion of accumulated material without rational control, producing works that often surprise and frighten them for their unexpected intensity. The difference is not one of degree but of nature: the artist is a technician of beauty, genius is a neurological victim of their own absorption capacity. Genuine creativity is neither a divine gift nor a mysterious talent, but an inevitable physiological response to the abnormal accumulation of lived experiences sedimented in the nervous system, reaching very high densities in the individual’s neural circuits. When a genius faces a blank canvas, an empty page, or musical silence, they are not about to give life to a superior inner vision, but about to discharge an explosive concentration of images lived, emotions layered over time, observed fragments of reality, and biographical tensions that have congested their perceptive apparatus with such intensity as to require channels of exceptional power for liberation. The brush tracing the first strokes obeys no conscious artistic project but follows paths of least resistance traced by tension gradients accumulated in the cerebral cortex. The colors chosen, the shapes emerging, the final composition are not the fruit of deliberate aesthetic decisions but the automatic result of the direction and intensity of internal pressures seeking release through the pictorial gesture. The genius writer who sits at their desk to compose a work is not about to build a literary creation but to lighten the superhuman load of words, images, narrative situations, heard dialogues, encountered characters, and lived or observed conflicts fermenting in their memory that must be expelled to avoid collapse of the linguistic-cognitive system. The plot that develops seemingly spontaneously, the characters that appear to take autonomous life, the dialogues that flow as if by magic do not arise from creative imagination but from the desperate need of the brain to organize the superabundant psychic material into coherent narrative structures that would otherwise cause mental fragmentation and loss of cognitive control. Music also reveals its nature as a pure expulsive phenomenon when we consider that the genius composer does not create melodies dictated by some supernatural entity but transforms into sound waves the neurochemical vibrations accumulated in their auditory-emotional apparatus through years of listening, study, existential suffering, and immersion in the sound environment. The notes chosen, rhythms developed, harmonies constructed correspond exactly to the frequencies of the internal tensions that must be discharged through acoustic organization. The genius performer who executes the piece is not communicating emotions to the audience through conscious expressive will but is using the audience itself as a discharge surface to liberate the sonic pressures generated by the musical work in their nervous system during study, memorization, and technical preparation. The audience, in turn, does not aesthetically enjoy the performance according to categories of beauty or the sublime but functions as an absorber of the genius’s expressive tensions, allowing the circulation and redistribution of psychic energy through emotional resonance mechanisms that maintain the entire social system involved in the artistic event in balance. Even the public’s enjoyment of the genius’s art follows this relentless logic: when we visit a painting exhibition, attend a Bach concert, or read a complex novel, we are not enriching our culture or elevating our spirit according to the clichés of humanistic education but using the genius’s work as a pressure valve for the existential, cognitive, and emotional tensions accumulated in our daily lives that require channels of liberation. Aesthetic emotion, artistic pleasure, even being moved by a masterpiece are merely symptoms of the ongoing discharge process: physiological signals indicating the release of psychic pressures through contact with expressive structures functioning as conductors for excess mental energy. In this perspective, the genius ceases to be a creator and becomes a transducer: a biological device specialized in converting experiential accumulations into symbolic forms that allow the social circulation of individual and collective tensions.

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