SELF RELIANCE partly closing oneself off from some of the innovations and advice coming from global and domestic centers. 18 (5) Through SR there wi/1 be more compatibility with local conditions. That factors will be better utilized has already been mentioned, that ecological concerns stand a better change will be indicated below. The type of conditions we have in mind here are not economic/ecological but structural/cultural. Selfreliance does not build walls in the sense that people are no longer given access to knowledge about production and consumption patterns outside the community /nation/region, but lt should foster, indeed be based on, more self-confidence. One important aspect would be to reverse the relation between technologies of production and consumption on the one hand the local structure and culture on the other from assuming {as Western social science has tended to do) that the latter have to yield to the former to a search and re-search for those technologies that are compatible with the structures and culture one wants to have. Thus, if people want to be together and talk with each other when they are working then individualizing and noisy means of production should not be chosen: there would be a search for other technologies. Under the condition of SR the local population will tend to trust their own intuitions more and respect foreign technology less. (6) Through SR there wi/1 be much more diversity of development. This is almost a tautology: when development cornes out of local conditions, according to the principle of concentrlc circles, local factors and local culture, values, traditions will force much more diversity into our world. Self-reliance 1s incompatible with imitation of model countries, and also counteracts the silent subversion of local culture through the culture and structure that always accompany the import of foreign technology and material things in general. One of the most important proofs of this hypothesis is given by China today: had China relied on technical assistance from either or both of the standard model countries, on trade, on transfer of technology etc. as the basic factor in her development the world would have " The individual leve1 paradigm for this is, of course, the way in which most people grow up through a phase of withdrawal from parental authorlty, establishing their own personalities through more autonomously gulded trial and error. From the parental point of view this is know as "the difflcult years" and "the puberty crisls". 61
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