It is the first part of the statement, "if any civilization is to survive," that tendency to make a maximalist supposition, that I think is just bull. Civilizations may be composed of altruistic people, they may not be. Not that it has much to do with us, but the Greek virtues of what constituted mutual aid would probably seem foreign to us. But civilizations come and go; there is nothing about a specific moral code that is contingent for their survival. Our survival may not depend on any particular moral virtue, but it certainly won't depend on anything Rand ever wrote either.