Irony in its Purest Form

This novel just keeps getting better and better. I have noticed that the irony in Candide is just top quality, and Voltaire makes us discover the irony in scenes we had heard of before but never related it to ironic situations. For example, it's ironic that a University, a place where knowledge and wisdom is supposed to be taught to make humanity prosper, suggests ceremonial human sacrifices as a superstitious act to prevent a second earthquake from happening. I won't go in to explain how absurd and anti humanistic these acts were, it is just a waste of time. Instead, I am going to compare this scene with a movie I saw a while back.

Wanted, with Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman

Wanted is about a clan of assassins who, by reading the patterns in the fabrics created by their sacred weaving machine, pick out names of random people for them to kill. Their justification is that by killing the innocent people whose names come out, they can prevent these people from killing thousands more. They really don't know much about the people they kill, some may have never even said a lie in their whole lives, but they still go ahead and kill them to prevent the future suffering they might cause. 

When I saw this movie, I didn't connect it to irony or superstition, but I know see a connection with the University's absurd suggestion. Both institutions claim that with just a little suffering from innocent people (the University used Jews who refused to eat pork, a Basque who was accused of marrying his godmother, and Candide and Pangloss for speaking), a bigger portion of people might be saved from bad situations. Voltaire is a genius in the way he holds up a mirror to society and makes them realize that what should be a respectable and wise institution like a University suggests such a horrible thing just because of a superstition, and also blames society and the common people for following along to these terrible acts just because a higher authority says so.

What happens next is astonishing. Under the University of Coimbra's supervision, Dr. Pangloss was hanged in order to prevent a second earthquake. Death has been a recurring theme so far in the novel, and Dr. Pangloss always explains every death has "sufficient reason" to happen. For a man who believes so much in sufficient reason and all that nonsense, is it ironic that his death didn't have sufficient reason for it to happen? I shouldn't make fun of a man's death, but his was very particular. He always claimed every death was meant to be since the beginning, and that the sufficient reason was provided by the environment it happened in. His death, however, was caused by him ranting about illogical things, and there wasn't sufficient reason for him to be hanged, since it was just a superstitious act. I guess he abandoned his belief of the best of worlds right before he was unjustly hanged in this cruel and unforgiving world. It was like if an animal rights' defender was trampled to death by a cow.