UTS Vice Chancellor's Democracy Forum with Fintan O'Toole

The Vice-Chancellor's Democracy Forum (VCDF) is UTS’s premier public lecture series. Each year, the Vice-Chancellor invites significant thinkers across various fields to engage in open dialogue on topics crucial to today's society and its advancement.

UTS is pleased to welcome Fintan O'Toole, one of the world's renowned columnists and writers, as he delivers his much anticipated talk, "The Perils of Self-Pity: Democracy and Identity in the Age of Trump," as our second speaker in this series. This is not just another lecture—it's a deep dive into the heart of our democratic crisis.

In this extraordinary "year of elections" , voters in many parts of the world are being asked, not just to choose between parties and candidates, but to decide whether they still believe in the democratic system itself. In this talk, Fintan O'Toole asks why systems and values that had been taken for granted for so long are now in such peril. He argues that a central part of the problem is the distortion of the sense of victimhood. There are profound injustices but the rising far-right movements have little interest in remedying them, Instead, they take the language of resistance to oppression and distort it into a self-pity in which even those who are highly privileged can feel sorry for themselves -- and imagine themselves to be victims of some other group. The result is a politics of tribalism in which defeating the Other is much more important than gaining anything tangible. How, he asks, can we combat this drift into tribalism and restore the sense of common purpose without which democracy becomes hollow?

Join Fintan O'Toole, with Anna Funder and Roy Green, as they explore why our long-standing systems and values are now under threat.

Speakers

Fintan O'Toole (keynote speaker) is an Irish Times columnist and writer known for his books We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 (2022), Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (2018), and Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger (2009). He contributes to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Granta, The Guardian, The Observer, and more.

Anna Funder (in conversation with Fintan O'Toole) is one of Australia’s most acclaimed and awarded writers. Her books Stasiland and All That I Am are prize-winning international bestsellers, translated into many languages. Wifedom, hailed as a ‘masterpiece’, has been chosen as a Notable Book of 2023 by the New York Times and a Book of the Year by The Times, The Economist, the Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph (UK) and The Telegraph (UK).

Roy Green AM (in conversation with Fintan O'Toole) is Emeritus Professor and Special Innovation Advisor at UTS, and former Dean of the UTS Business School. Roy has enjoyed a career in universities, government and industry and has published widely in the areas of innovation and public policy, including projects with the OECD and European Commission. Currently Roy is Chair of the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) Hub and the Port of Newcastle and a board director for CSIRO and the SmartSat CRC.