EP6 Fintan O'Toole on The Perils of Self-Pity: Democracy and Identity in the Age of Trump

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?

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 can we combat this drift into tribalism and restore the sense of common purpose without which democracy becomes hollow?

Fintan O'Toole (keynote speaker) is one of Ireland's leading political and cultural commentators. Fintan is a columnist with The Irish Times and Leonard L. Milberg visiting lecturer in Irish Letters at Princeton University.

He is the winner of both the Orwell Prize and the European Press Prize, and the author of more than 25 books. His most recent book, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958, was named 2021 Book of the Year by the Irish Book Awards and as one of the ten best books of 2022 by the New York Times.

Dr Anna Funder (moderator) is an award-winning author and UTS Luminary. Anna is the author of Stasiland, All That I Am, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life and the novella The Girl With the Dogs. Anna’s novel Wifedom was a Sunday Times Bestseller and New York Times Notable Book of 2023.

Roy Green AM (moderator) is an Emeritus Professor and Special Innovation Advisor at UTS. Roy is on the Board of CSIRO and the SmartSat CRC, and he is a member of the CSU Council and Australian Design Council and Committee for Sydney Economics Advisory Council.

The Vice-Chancellor's Democracy Forum (VCDF) is UTS’s premier public lecture series. This is the second of the 2024 forum series, held on 26 September 2024.

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.

Impact Talks at UTS is produced by UTS Impact Studios, with sound engineering by Alison Zhuang.