The above is not the ultimate progression from Objectivism as you seem to proclaim with relish. What you state is against rational self-interest. It is not logical for individuals to destroy each other in a game of one-up-man-ship. You must see that Objectivism itself provides man the "logical stopping point."
How can you sleep at night when you claim that the most intransigent anti-Communist of the 21st Century was on par with Marx and Stalin?!
I know that Objectivism markets its conclusions differently than I analyze them. You can pick whichever version suits you. I stand by my analysis, because human nature is involved, and the marketing for every system eventually gives way to the pragmatic and mostly disappointing reality of attempted implementation.
Rational self-interest is just such a problem. The rational application of mutual self-interest often provides some major, common themes that can unify social structure in beneficial ways. Natural Law says exactly the same thing, and said so long before Rand. Objectivism goes off the rails and is inferior to Natural Law because it does not acknowledge any higher duty that may require the cessation of self-interested behavior as measured by some standard of rationality.
The attempts to circumvent this accusation by appeal to such things as genetic altruism, for example, ring hollow. Nietzsche was more honest, if less well understood. In practice, pure self-interest is whatever you can see in front of you at the moment, as it pertains to you, the seeing individual. If Stalin can make a comfortable life for himself by slaughtering millions, why shouldn’t he? He has fulfilled the Objectivist maxim … for himself. Rationally, the others, the dead, the dying, the imprisoned, the sycophantic, do not matter. If Stalin wins for himself, all is well with the universe.
Now, if you are lucky enough to be having a social beer with him, you may attempt to persuade him that he is really acting against himself, and doubtless in your own highly rational mind you could show this is true. But if materiality is all there is, then whoso gets the most for the longest wins, as they see it. Morality founded exclusively on the self sounds like an elegant solution. In reality it becomes a rationalization for narcissism, a stem cell that mutates according to the Kantian limits and distortions of the particular self it infects, producing sometimes a Gandhi, sometimes a Stalin, sometimes a middle-class producer who is tired of the vampirism of the welfare state.
Natural Law, by contrast, sets the table with not only rational self interest but also civic duty and virtue, universal norms that sometime put the ego in tension with the common good. This is the best of all possible worlds, and it has been time-tested and works quite well in the context of fallible human nature. It is the key that unlocks the mystery of why we Americans have succeeded all these centuries. Our Constitution, our Declaration, our Founders, were all based squarely on theistic Natural Law, and not in the empty void proposed by Objectivism’s godless universe.
Objectivism is Rand grasping at straws to reject the inevitable consequences of both Nietzsche’s amorality and Christian morality (which she explicitly rejected) without seeming to resort to theism of any kind, but cherry-picking those Natural Law principles that suited her purpose. Yet it is a cheat, because it contained an embedded “should,” because a belief that we “should” act or think any particular way is an appeal to an Arbiter, which she says she denies. Nietzsche recognizes this and openly exposes the cheat. Rand papers over it, using “Reason” as a stand-in deity. In practice, humans must implement either system. Therefore, the results must be the same, and equally disappointing, for systems that share a common root. Sorry. I’ve lived too long to be beguiled into believing otherwise, people being what they are.
Peace,
SR