What the fuck was his problem?

He was a contrarian. He realized that going against the grain is the best way to gain popularity, even if you have nothing to say.

This is why his "masterpiece" Candide was based on a downright misrepresentation of Leibniz' optimism without offering a viable alternative, why he wrote an entire poem depicting Jeanne d'Arc like she was some cheap whore, and why he loved slandering Rousseau -a man who actually bothered with thinking up new ideas.

>without offering a viable alternative,
If someone stuffs rocks in your sandals, you do not need to invent the shoe in order to point out that something is wrong.

Except Optimism was a philosophical perspective which sought to explain the suffering in our world. In that way "lol, just b urself n cultivate ur own garden" is no answer to that philosophical problem. That's exactly because Voltaire was no philosopher, he was a popular writer. He was to philosophy what Bill Nye is to science.

>Except Optimism was a philosophical perspective which sought to explain the suffering in our world.
That's nice. It was an unsatisfying one. Pointing that fact out in no way implies that one must replace it.

>Pointing that fact out
Except Voltaire never did that, he set up a strawman only to knock it down. He took an idea that meant something among the lines of
>The evil that exists right now is a neccessity. We live in the best possible world because a world with less evil would mean sacrificing other things (such as free will for example)
and turned it into
>LOL if your life wasn't shit and you didn't get mutilated and almost died in a war and get shipwrecked you wouldn't be eating roasted nuts right now always look on le bright side of life xDDD
It's downright falsehood. This is why Leibniz is remembered as a great philosophical (as well as scientific) mind even by those who disagreed with him and Voltaire is not.

I neither like it nor is it Canada.

>if your life wasn't shit and you didn't get mutilated and almost died in a war and get shipwrecked
So, in other words, the evil that exists in the world
>you wouldn't be eating roasted nuts right now
facilitates some good you are now experiencing.

Where does the falsehood come in? At worst, there is an uncharitable revealing of the actual implications behind the philosophy.

>Where does the falsehood come in?
The part where it does not refute the argument at all. It tries to rob the credibility of a thesis that presupposes evil by pointing out that evil exists, and reduces Optimism to "everything is awesome".

A more Leibnizian reaction to that situation would be "a world in which all that evil would've been made impossible (ie. in which humans lack the free will to go to war) would not be a more desirable world".

It simply brings down the "it would be undesirable for evil not to exist" to a level where a person actually experiences it

Exactly, it turns the counterargument into "but evil exists!". It's "witty" but lacks any philsophical depth, which can be said of everything Voltaire wrote.

>america revolts to avoid taxes
>wins the war
>still pay taxes to this very day

We revolted because we wanted representation in Parliament. We were fine with paying taxes in general, but not with having them foisted upon us without proper representation.

It points out the absurdity of saying that evil is more desirable than non-evil by stripping out the fanciful language and portraying the fruit directly.