Groups live on partial sacrifice
A group thrives when members give up some private interest for the whole. Family is the smallest working model; when families stop doing the same for society, decline starts as individual convenience outruns responsibility.
A group only survives and thrives when members sacrifice some of their interests for the group. Family is the smallest successful model of this that most of us have seen. Similar sacrifices, when each family also holds some larger social interest, keep a society safer and more prosperous than a collection of pure private maximisers would.
I do not romanticise misery. I am saying something structural. Individual pleasure and convenience taking permanent priority over social responsibility and national interest is where decline starts for any nation. Philosophical roots in leadership matter here: what a leadership class treats as normal becomes permission for everyone else. Duty, in that frame, is not a seasonal campaign. It is required for as long as people live together at scale.
From X
Derived from posts on X as devendrasm: