The secessions in his life were progressive repudiations of American canons of moral conduct as well as indications of Nearing's perception of the fragmented, segmented, discontinuous nature of American society. Only in the isolated private sphere provided by homesteading could a radical resistance and constructive challenge to capitalist culture be nurtured. In his devotion to conscientious self-reliance, Nearing emerged as a twentieth-century colleague of Emerson and Thoreau. This view, that Nearing chose to "drop out" of politics and society itself and live life as a rugged agrarian individualist at one with nature, is a common interpretation—and certainly one with some merit. Another possible reading of Nearing's motivations and decision-making lies in his own writing. Nearing repeatedly drew inspiration from the life story of Count Leo Tolstoi, whose life Nearing clearly saw as analogous to his own:  Count Leo Tolstoi is a classic example of an individual in potential and actual conflict with his group. He was talented and had immense vitality. Until young manhood he accepted his place in the Tsarist social pattern and generally conformed to it. After some drastic experiences and much soul searching, Leo Tolstoi challenged the social system under which he lived to mortal combat. From that point until the day he left home and died in a railway station in his final attempt to win out against group pressures, his life consisted of combats with members of his family, with members of the neighboring nobility, with the army, with the Tsarist autocracy and with the established church. The tension between the dissident individual and the group was an unenviable one, Nearing believed. In the conflict between the solitary individual and the community, Nearing identified only three possible outcomes:  (1) The individual may win out and impose himself and his ideas upon the group. The normal consequence of such an outcome is a personal dictatorship or the imposition upon the community of an oligarchy in which the dissident individual or individuals play a prominent role. (2) The division of the community into factions, one of which upholds the dissident individual, with a stalemate leading to feuding, rebellion, civil war. (3) The group wins out, imposes its will and eliminates the non-conformist. Such conflict sequences have occurred repeatedly in contemporary and in earlier history. Nearing's chosen lifestyle of "Tolstoian," ascetic, rural self-sufficiency may be reasonably interpreted as the attempt of a self-aware dissident individual to avoid inevitably negative participation in the internal life of the group (be it a government or a political party), while retaining a keen and almost obsessive interest in the dynamics of society and the world as a whole.