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“It was natural on that golden evening that I should jump at the idea of a social paradise,” says Wells’ Time-Traveler. As he subsequently reflects:

In time, the Sixties rebels ascended to power and became the teachers, and then their children, until we were three generations removed from memories of World War and Depression.

During the 2010 World Cup, the eminent Egyptian imam Mus’id Anwar gave a sermon in Cairo attacking young men who follow soccer instead of memorizing the Koran:

Ask one of those young men who are so crazy about soccer to name the names of twenty of the Prophet’s companions. Only 20! The Prophet Muhammad’s companions numbered over 100,000. All I’m asking for is the name of 20 companions…. But if you ask the same guy to give you the names of 20 soccer players, he will… give you the names of the reserve team players, of those who are still active, and those who have retired.⁶

Who’s to blame for this? Well, the imam looked into it and quickly discovered who’s seducing the Muslims away from their Korans: As you know, the Jews have The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Over 100 years ago, they formulated a plan to rule the world, and they are implementing this plan.

One of the protocols says: “Keep the [non-Jews] preoccupied with songs, soccer, and movies.” Is it or isn’t it happening? It is.

Don’t some of them die in the course of a soccer match? At an important match in Egypt, a man was standing in the stadium, and when his team scored a goal, he screamed “Gooooaaal!” got a heart attack, and died…. The Zionists manage to generate animosity among Muslims, and even between Muslim countries, by means of soccer. Whose interests does this serve? The Jews.

Oh, it’s easy to be skeptical. After all, if soccer is part of the international Jewish Conspiracy, how come Israel has only managed to qualify for the World Cup on one occasion (1970) and got knocked out in Round One?⁷

Ah, but that just shows how cunning these Jews are. At the time the distinguished cleric was advancing his theory, I happened to be in Bordeaux and found myself outside the Virgin Megastore, which brands itself in France as “La culture du plaisir”—The Culture of Pleasure. As far as I know, the chain doesn’t operate in the Middle East. If you’re a Muslim, you have to wait till you self-detonate to hit the Virgin Megastore, big time and with our entire inventory priced to clear. But it struck me that the western world’s self-evaluation isn’t so very different from Imam Anwar’s diagnosis: we promote ourselves as “the Culture of Pleasure”—preoccupied, as the imam says, with songs, sports, movies, and other sensual delights.

Or as H. G. Wells put it: “This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then come languor and decay.”

Because even the “culture” part of “la culture du plaisir” eventually becomes too much effort. Our age does not produce great symphonies or operas but merely electronic delivery systems, new toys for enjoying old strains. The “artistic impetus would at last die away,” wrote Wells of the Eloi. “To adorn themselves with flowers, to dance, to sing in the sunlight: so much was left of the artistic spirit, and no more. Even that would fade in the end into a contented inactivity.”

Odd how many philosophical singalongs of the Sixties that one sentence anticipates: “If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair”; “All we need is music… and dancin’ in the streets”; “We’ll sing in the sunshine, we’ll laugh every day….”

A culture of pleasure can be very convenient for the government class.

In Huxley’s Brave New World, the World State Controller, to whom the author gave the oddly prescient name of Mustapha Mond, understands that people prefer happiness to truth, “happiness” being defined as round-the-clock sensory gratification—food, drugs, sex, consumer toys. Given that he was writing in the late Twenties, Huxley’s parody pop songs anticipate very well the sensual torpor of our own culture du plaisir: