History proves, from the growth of Rome to the birth of the United States, that the key requirement for any such endeaver is for men to adhere to a duty above and beyond their pursuit of personal happiness or even their lives. How else to understand and explain what it was that motivated our ancestors to die at Valley Forge or Guadalcanal than a sense of duty and sacrifice. How else to understand and explain what our forefathers did when they came here with nothing except the belief that their sacrifice would make for a better life for their children
Even Aristotle said that true happiness is gained by making the correct moral choices throughout one's life.But the conundrum lies in that making the correct moral choices sometimes entails the sacrifice of what you think will make you happy or even your life. Because in the end happiness cannot be pursued for itself. It will always lead to selfishness and seperation from others. True happiness can only be the end result of doing something else. Like sacrificing for a great cause. Or doing your duty to your children or your parents or your country.
The reason Ayn Rand never had children and was unfaithful to her husband is instructive. She lived her philosophy. In the end she was not a builder, she was a consumer. She consumed the seed corn better men than she had produced. How ironic.
Were you in the French Foreign Legion?
My sense of duty does not exist because you think it should be what makes me happy. The child in me screams that you can't tell me what to do! I make a tacit agreement with my fellow man to adhere to the guidelines of moral and civil society only from my own enlightened self-interest.
I am a moral person because that is the best way to coexist with others and I logically expect only the same from them. No Saint or Potentate will coerce me into duty and sacrifice without justification.
You speak of finding happiness through a sense of duty and sacrifice to its own sake. The Gladiators of Rome through a sense of duty and sacrifice were coerced into giving their lives only to serve evil.
I have lived and will live an upright life according to God's plan and only expect happiness to follow as it will. True happiness can only be the end result of living a correct life and hopefully finding a wonderful wife's smile, or the sweetest dog in the world laying his muzzle in you lap when you least expect it, or driving down the highway and seeing a sea of Irises growing wild around an abandoned and crumbling chimney.
Duty alone means nothing without the enlightened self-interest that makes that duty worth doing.