Say you are to go out hunting. The modern rifle is a powerful tool taken for granted by those fortunate to be able to acquire one. From a far distance, one can take down even large and powerful animals in large groups, and the sudden thunderclap and inexplicably dropped animal causes the others to flee in terror, leaving the kill to be safely processed. The prospects for self-reliance here are obvious: with some skill and patience, one can go out alone and be quite successful at low risk.
But now to go out with a spear, or even a bow, and the difficulty and risks go up pretty quickly. One has to get much closer to large, powerful animals, and risk massive or fatal physical injury. One's frailty is cast in stark relief. The more one relies on oneself in this context, the more dangerous and fraught the situation becomes.
The rifle then exhudes incredible power, but that power comes from a whole world of coordinated production. Say, the raw materials, the lumber, the steel, the oil, the gunpowder, the lead, and all of the worlds of extraction, refining, and manufacturing implied by those materials, and then the supply chains and circuits of distribution delivering them into one's hands, all of which are powered by a vast, sprawling, and constant stream of human labor.
Further there is the sprawling history of invention and design, which ensures that that incredible emission of energy proceeds forward towards one's target, and not backwards and into one's face.
One's self-reliance and security hinges upon the steady flow of the industrial world.
The self-contained and ready-made rifle springs magically out of the packaging box, ready to do one's bidding. Perhaps after one has worked hard to earn the money to buy it, or perhaps not. But this alienable property of the rifle commodity conceals a vast separation from the original points of extraction and assembly.
With a simple wooden tool on the other hand, one splits it off of the fallen tree, witnessing all of the tragedy of a felled great organism, and the destruction of a home: birds spring from their nests and colonies of ants and beetles scurry from the hollows within the split wood. The lumber is literally pried and wrenched from the earth, but this terrible tragedy ultimately nourishes oneself and one's community.
Such a connection still exists in the genesis of the rifle, but to the perception and the individual consciousness, the connection has exploded to points far beyond possible detection in one's waking life, out to faraway lands and processes one will never visit or witness, and so all the terribleness and preciousness of such a tragedy disappears from view, and its spiritual effects wane.
Amidst the stream of a well-advanced society, this magical power appears suddenly to those privileged its access, free of those binding fibers in which it was torn from the earth and from human labor. To the curious and the conscientious, gratefulness for such power may still exist, but to many others, they may go on with their own personal endeavors with not a thought to the origin of such power, and further ascend on the phantom backs of raw material and cheap coordinated labor.
This is one way in which the elite becomes separated from the earth.
