Churchills, Hitlers, and Hedonists

In 1941 George Orwell said:

Hitler is a criminal lunatic, and [yet] Hitler has an army of millions of men, aeroplanes in thousands, tanks in tens of thousands. For his sake a great nation has been willing to overwork itself for six years and then to fight for two years more, whereas for the common-sense, essentially hedonistic world-view which Mr. Wells puts forward, hardly a human creature is willing to shed a pint of blood

Is this true? Have the number of people with a "common-sense, essentially hedonistic world-view" grown? Is that a problem?