compulsion to benefit the commonalty … .” [394W-{1-2/49} Jesus of Nazareth: PW Vol. VIII. p. 321]
“The Political State lives only on the vices of society, whose virtues are derived solely from the human individuality. (…) … the essence of the free Individuality is necessity.” [509W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 193]
Wotan needs a hero freed from these prosaic egoistic motives who not only can, but spontaneously will, breach the contracts predicated on egoism which have trapped Wotan, and in this way free Wotan from the trap he set himself. As Wagner described this redemption below, it is the state’s “going-under”:
“… the Going-under of the State can mean nothing else but the self-realisement of Society’s religious conviction (Bewusstsein) of its purely-human essence. By its very nature, this conviction can be no Dogma stamped upon us from without, i.e. it cannot rest on historical traditions, nor be drilled into us by the State. So long as any one of life’s actions is demanded of us as an outward Duty, so long is the object of that action no object of Religious Conscience; for when we act from the dictates of religious conscience we act from out ourselves, we so act as we cannot act otherwise. But Religious Conscience means a universal conscience (allgemeinsames Bewusstsein); and conscience cannot be universal, until it knows the Unconscious, the Instinctive, the Purely-human, as the only true and necessary thing, and vindicates it by that knowledge.” [513W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 201]
In truth, Wotan, by virtue of confessing the knowledge of his historical trap to Bruennhilde, his unconscious mind, and thus repressing it, is in the process of achieving “the Going-under of the State.”
Wotan fears that in the natural course of world history Alberich and/or his host of night will eventually be able to break religious faith’s prohibition on freedom of thought and liberate the Ring, Tarnhelm, and Hoard of knowledge, the sources of Alberich’s power, to serve Alberich’s intent to overthrow the gods, unless Wotan launches some kind of pre-emptive strike and removes the ring from Fafner’s (from religious faith’s, i.e., from fear of truth’s) hands. Feuerbach provides the reason for Wotan’s fear that Alberich will eventually regain his Ring and its power, and overthrow religious faith, in the previously cited passage below:
[P. 302] “But whence comes this weakness of faith? From the fact that the power of belief is nothing other than the power of imagination, and that reality is an infinitely greater power, directly opposed to the imagination. (…) [P. 303] … as even the greatest heroes of faith have confessed, it flies in the face of sensory evidence, natural feeling, and man’s innate tendency to disbelief. How, indeed, can anything built on constraint, on the forcible repression of a sound inclination, anything exposed at every moment to the mind’s doubts and the contradictions of experience, provide a firm and secure foundation?” [326F-LER: p. 302-303]
It is inevitable that this doubt, ever more widely distributed among men, will eventually overthrow faith in the gods. So, if Wotan wishes to salvage any of the poetry and beauty of man’s old religion, he must find a hero who can, as religious faith once did, somehow take the mind (the Ring)
