Ralph Keyes

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Ralph J. Keyes (born January 12, 1945 ) is an American lecturer and non-fiction author, whose work mainly includes advice and motivational literature. His bestseller, Is There Life After High School? was adapted as a musical in 1982 and performed on Broadway . His guidebook The Courage to Write , published in 1995, is regarded in the United States as a standard work for young writers plagued by self-doubt.

In the German-speaking world, Keyes is known as the originator of the expression “Post-truth”, whose German loan translation “ post factual ” was chosen as Word of the Year in 2016 by the Society for the German Language . The book in which Keyes presented his concept of Post-truth - The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life (2004) - has hardly been received internationally and is only available in the original English version.

Keyes has dealt with many popular topics in his lectures and books, but his perspective is primarily that of a psychologist .

life and work

Ralph Keyes attended Yellow Springs High School in Yellow Springs , Ohio and then studied at the local Antioch College, where he graduated in 1967. After a brief period of study at the London School of Economics and Political Science , he worked from 1968 to 1970 for the Long Island newspaper Newsday . Keyes spent the next 10 years in La Jolla , where he was a Fellow of the Center for Studies of the Person , a Carl Rogers- oriented group of psychologists that left the Western Behavioral Science Institute in 1968 . In Philadelphia he then began a career as a freelance writer and lecturer.

Since the 1990s he has been particularly interested in language; Since then, his books have often dealt with quotations, words and concepts and the manipulative handling of them.

Keyes lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio with his wife Muriel.

The Post-Truth Era

In 2004 Keyes' book The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life was published . It was the first book to have the word "Post-Truth" in its title. In this book, Keyes dealt with everyday lies from a popular psychological point of view , and his stated intention was to heighten the sensitivity of his readers to the little swindles that are committed in everyday life without giving much thought to them.

In his book, Keyes reports on studies by Noelie Rodriguez and Alan Ryave (1990) and by Robert S. Feldman (2002), in which it was measured how often ordinary people lie in everyday conversations; The finding in both studies was that almost everyone is constantly telling more or less great untruths. Although these studies were pioneering work and corresponding measurements were not available for earlier periods, Keyes concludes: “There is a growing suspicion that more lies than ever are being told.” (“The suspicion grows that more lies are being told than ever before. ") And: " we live in fib-friendly times. " (" We live in a dizzy-friendly time. ") Keyes mentions that official lies have blossomed in the past - for example during the Vietnam War or the Watergate affair . With reference to the British journalist Jeremy Campbell ( The Liar's Tale , 2002) , Keyes cites the turn of the millennium as the specific date for the "decline of sincerity" , and refers to the psychologists Dan O'Hair and Michael Cody, who - what Keyes is hiding - they carried out their study on lying back in the mid-1980s. While he leaves his thesis that lying has indeed increased, he cites authors such as Ben Bradlee , who bear testimony to a perceived increase in lying.

Keyes does not believe that previous generations had higher ethical standards, but believes that it has become easier to tell lies and that caught liars faced more serious consequences in the past than they do today. He describes a situation in which people lie without having a guilty conscience as "post-truth". His central point of criticism is a decline not in ethical standards, but in social control mechanisms that no longer ostracize and punish lies.

The book is stylistically very similar to David Callahan's The cheating culture , published in the same year .

Publications

German translations of Keyes' books are not yet available.

  • We, the Lonely People: Searching for Community . Harper & Row, New York 1973.
  • Is There Life After High School? Warner Books, New York 1976, ISBN 978-0-446-89394-7 .
  • The Height of Your Life . Little, Brown, New York 1980.
  • Chancing It: Why We Take Risks . Little, Brown, New York 1985.
  • Timelock: How Life Got So Hectic and What You Can Do About It . Harper Collins, New York 1991.
  • Sons on Fathers: A Book of Men's Writing . Harper Collins, New York 1992.
  • Nice Guys Finish Seventh: False Phrases, Spurious Sayings, and Familiar Misquotations . Harper Collins, New York 1992, ISBN 978-0-06-270020-9 .
  • The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear . Henry Holt, New York 1995.
  • The Wit & Wisdom of Harry Truman . Harper Collins, New York 1995.
  • The Wit & Wisdom of Oscar Wilde . Harper Collins, New York 1996.
  • With Richard Farson: Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins: The Paradox of Innovation . Free Press, New York 2002, ISBN 978-0-7432-2592-2 .
  • The Writer's Book of Hope: Getting from Frustration to Publication . Henry Holt, New York 2003.
  • The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life . St. Martin's Press, New York 2004, ISBN 978-0-312-30648-9 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  • The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When . St. Martin's Press, New York 2006, ISBN 978-0-312-34004-9 .
  • I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech . St. Martin's Press, New York 2009, ISBN 978-0-312-34005-6 .
  • Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms . Little, Brown, New York 2010, ISBN 978-0-316-05656-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Is there life after high school? Retrieved February 23, 2017 .
  2. ^ The Courage to Write. Retrieved February 23, 2017 (www.goodreads.com).
  3. ^ Ralph Keyes: The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life. Retrieved February 23, 2017 (World Cat).
  4. ↑ Ralph Keyes: Demise of Antioch College. Retrieved February 23, 2017 .
  5. ↑ a b Ralph Keyes: Author. Retrieved February 23, 2017 .
  6. ^ History of CSP. Retrieved February 23, 2017 .
  7. ^ The Post-Truth Era, p. 9
  8. ^ Robert S. Feldman, James A. Forrest, Benjamin R. Happ: Self-Presentation and Verbal Deception: Do Self-Presenters Lie More? In: Journal of Basic and Applied Social Psychology . tape 24 , no. 2 , 2002, p. 163-170 . Noelie Rodriguez, Alan Ryave: Telling lies in everyday life: Motivational and organizational consequences of sequential preferences . In: Qualitative Sociology . tape 13 , 1990, pp. 195 .
  9. ^ The Post-Truth Era, p. 4
  10. ^ The Post-Truth Era, p. 8
  11. ^ The Post-Truth Era, p. 11
  12. ↑ Jeremy Campbell: The liar's tale: a history of falsehood . WW Norton, New York 2002.
  13. ↑ The Post-Truth Era, pp. 9, 11; Dan O'Hair, Michael Cody, R. Behnke: Communication apprehension and vocal stress as indices of deception . In: The Western Journal of Speech Communication . tape 49 , 1985, pp. 286-300 .
  14. ^ The Post-Truth Era, p. 11
  15. ^ The Post-Truth Era, p. 10
  16. ^ The Post-Truth Era, p. 13
  17. ↑ The Post-Truth Era, pp. 17f
  18. ^ The Post-Truth Era. Retrieved February 25, 2017 (reviewed in Publishers Weekly).
personal data
SURNAME Keyes, Ralph
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Keyes, Ralph J.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American non-fiction author and public speaker
DATE OF BIRTH January 12, 1945