self-destruction. Fasolt pursues his critique of the gods’ rule, noting that the gods bound freemen such as the Giants to keep the peace among themselves with these contracts. As Fasolt observes that the Giants will flee the gods’ rule if they can’t keep faith, we hear another new motif #28, sometimes known as the “Treaty Motif,” which is derived directly from #21, and of course represents the honoring of contracts and the social contract itself, which restrains man’s egoistic impulses (the Giants) through laws, customs, traditions, received wisdom, etc.
Wotan’s Spear, taken from the World-Ash’s “holiest bough,” and engraved with the runes spelling out the dubious contract Wotan (under Loge’s influence) made with the Giants to build Valhalla in exchange for Freia, is Wagner’s metaphor for the social contract itself. Wotan’s contract with the Giants, i.e., with man’s egoistic tendency toward selfishness rather than social cooperation, is the archetype for all specific contracts and laws which govern society, including of course what is regarded as divinely ordained law (man’s first kind of law). This is the first fruit of consciousness. Feuerbach said (figuratively, of course) that the state, human history, and language originated by contract:
“… the state, and thus world-history – for the origin of the state is the origin of world-history – … language, and thus reason, originated by contract … .” [10F-TDI: p. 79]
Feuerbach also noted that egoism (the Giants) is the underlying motive which guarantees all contracts, all reckoning of good and evil, all morality, even in the absence of divine sanction:
“ … nothing is more groundless than the fear that the distinction between right and wrong, good and evil, must vanish with the gods. The distinction exists and will continue to exist as long as there is a difference between me and thee, for this is the source of ethics and law. My egoism may permit me to steal, but my fellow man’s egoism will sternly forbid me; left to myself I may know nothing of unselfishness, but the selfishness of others will teach me the virtue of unselfishness.” [327F-LER: p. 303]
It is, he says, human egoism that insures that others’ egoism will not impinge on our own, or vice versa. In the social contract we all agree to restrain the satisfaction of our egoistic impulses (the Giants make peace) for the sake of the satisfaction of our egoism on a tolerable scale which is not socially disruptive, as Wagner put it in his paraphrase of Feuerbach below:
“To the fear of violence from … [ … the violent, … passionate individual …], as also to a modicum of knowledge thus acquired of basic human nature, we owe the State. In it the Need is expressed as the human Will’s necessity of establishing some workable agreement among the myriad blindly-grasping individuals into which it is divided. It is a contract whereby the units seek to save themselves from mutual violence, through a little mutual practice of restraint. … in the State the unit offered up just so much of his egoism as appeared necessary to ensure for himself the contentment of its major bulk.” [695W-{64-2/65} On State and Religion: PW Vol. IV, p. 11]
The essence of society, according to Wagner, is stasis, security, quiet based upon wont, custom, care, fear of the new and dislike of innovation, that is to say, security and quiet at the cost of individual freedom of expression:
