The Price We Pay For The Sugar You Eat

Immediately upon leaving Eldorado, Candide and Cacambo encounter a slave who has had a leg and a hand cut off. He tells them, “It is the price we pay for the sugar you eat in Europe” (p. 52). What relationship is Voltaire suggesting here between happiness and suffering, between the best of all possible worlds and the worst of all possible worlds? How might Voltaire make this point if he were writing today? 

Happiness and suffering: two polar opposites that appear to work hand in hand in the world of Candide. The best of all possible worlds is relative; it has to be compared to some lesser world by whomever declares it to be the best. For every “best” world there has to be a “worst”. They coincide, and when Candide and Pangloss, men from the “best” world, enter the “worst” world, they have a little trouble adjusting their all-encompassing idea that all of the world is the best of possible worlds. They were not exposed to suffering, they were not exposed to wanting. They had to discover the fact that there is no best world without the suffering of the worst world.

If Voltaire were to make this parallel today, he could easily make it in the unbridgeable gap between the well-to-do and the peasants in this “fine” country we live in. America can seem like the best of all possible worlds to the few who can afford to live it up, but to the other 99%, it’s the worst.