In other words, Candide must learn to fight the complacency that makes unbridled optimism seductive, yet dangerous. .

             As Lawall and Mack also suggest: "The real problem, Candide suggests, is not natural or human disaster so much as human complacency" ("Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire 1694-1778", p. 518). As Voltaire implies throughout Candide, simplistic, quasi-rational thinking, as exemplified by absurd declarations by Pangloss, e.g., "noses were made to support spectacles, hence we have spectacles" (p. 521) is not enough to counteract the real damage human beings characteristically inflict on one another. Before Candide is jettisoned from the Baron's castle, Pangloss continually tells him "everything is for the best" (p. 521), and throughout most of the story, Candide still believes it, even as events themselves starkly and vividly illustrate the opposite. .

             In Pangloss's own case, even his own case of syphilis, from which he is dying, is "an indispensable part of the best of worlds, a necessary ingredient . . ." (p. 526). In fact, with its piling-up of incidents of hideous, usually completely avoidable human misfortunes (except for the Lisbon earthquake), the story systematically disproves Pangloss's insistent view that: "It is clear . . . that things cannot be otherwise than they are, for since everything is made to serve an end, everything necessarily serves the best end" (p. 521). .

             In the topsy-turvy world inhabited by Candide and his friends, almost nothing is, in fact, either as it morally should be or as it superficially appears to be. The old woman Candide and Cunegonde meet along the way, who tells them her story in Chapters 11 and 12, turns out to be "the daughter of Pope Urban the Tenth" (p. 535). Later on, Candide, still sincerely in love, asks Don Fernando, the Governor of Buenos Aires, to marry him and Cunegonde. Instead, Cunegonde, at the old woman's coaxing, is easily persuaded to marry Don Fernando, who is, in the words of the old woman, "the greatest lord in South America, who has a really handsome mustache" (p.