Billy Corgan Schools Howie Mandel on Hollywood Psychopathy

And Mandel doesn't get it

Public perception of the problem of psychopathy, especially psychopathy in high places, has shifted over the past couple decades. Years ago, I encountered more resistance to the idea, or just simple ignorance. People have never exactly liked politicians, but they rarely considered them clinical psychopaths. Nowadays, if I point it out, I often get a response saying something like, “Yeah, that’s obvious, but what do we do about it?”

However, despite this, the level of public awareness about the nature of psychopathy is still pretty dismal. That’s why I do what I do, and why I appreciate the efforts of people like Dr. Karen Mitchell, whose thesis on the topic I have been covering for the past months.

I recently watched a great example of this debate play itself out on Howie Mandel’s podcast, where he interviewed the rockstar frontman of The Smashing Pumpkins and owner of the National Wrestling Alliance, Billy Corgan. At one point in the interview, Corgan described what it was like being open in the nineties about his history of being abused as a child, his own mental health struggles, and how some in the business saw it as an act.

What follows is a transcript of where the conversation went from there, with my commentary:

BC: You risk a lot when you’re in a position of success in the public sphere, in the arts, by saying, oh, by the way, I’m a real human being, and oh, by the way, I sometimes struggle. You’re literally asking for trouble. So it takes a lot of courage to even talk about it, whether or not anybody believes you, it’s not your problem or our problem, but that’s what I would remind people. It’s like, it does come at a cost.

HM: Though the benefits outweigh the cost, you know.

BC: If you believe in such things, yes, I mean, but we are surrounded in this town of Hollywood Land by sociopaths. How many people do you know that are very successful that are completely insane or not very nice people? It’s more than one, I know that without knowing you that well.

Corgan’s point seems to have been that by being honest in this way, it opens you up to attacks from people who do not have your best interests at the top of their list of priorities. Like sharks smelling blood, predatory personalities (“sociopaths”) see that kind of disclosure as a sign of vulnerability or a pretext for targeting you. Openness may come with its own benefits, but those will be tempered and perhaps even outbalanced by the new abuses such openness might provoke.

HM: I think the human condition is insane and not… What is well, you know? And what is successful?

Mandel misses Corgan’s point here, making a comment on the general human condition and the subjectivity of classifiers such as wellness and success. Mandel is doing what I sometimes call “flattening” of reality. It’s kind of as if someone were to make a comment about another person who is remarkably stupid, and then someone else chimes in to say, “Well, humanity itself is pretty stupid, no?” In the realm of psychopathy, this is how human predators get away with what they do. It’s why we use phrases like “wolf in sheep’s clothes.” If they can just blend in, and if people are convinced that deep down, everyone is really just the same, they can evade detection and cause immeasurable harm to others. The human condition may in fact be insane, in some sense, but that is not Corgan’s point, so he then tries another direction:

BC: But let me sort of go at you this way. Make up a pop star in your mind, male or female or non-gender, doesn’t matter, okay? Most of those people, their success is rooted in presenting an image which is not real. It’s a form of acting, and they’re oftentimes rewarded for it. So to step outside that lane and say, oh, by the way, I’m a real person, here’s my family, here’s my life, here’s my up, here’s my down, that takes you out of that lane, that prefabricated lane, which in the social media area is very rewarded.

Here he describes one of the main attributes of psychopathy (or “dark personalities”). In Mitchell’s “persistent predatory personality” model she labels a group of attributes as “the truth is not easy to distinguish or believe,” in which she includes individual attributes like these: always cultivates a facade of “normal,” chameleon-like, dishonest, devious and manipulative. In show business, Corgan observes, this behavior is rewarded. In an industry that rewards the creation and maintenance of a particular type of persona, psychopaths will naturally excel. However, Mandel doesn’t pick up on this and continues to flatten human reality by projecting his own psychology onto others:

HM: But you realize that, this is just my theory, that lane, whether you’re a pop star, whether you’re a musician, whether you’re a comedian, whether you’re an actor, we all create a character and put on a costume, and whether you’re the bank manager and you’re putting on a tie and you’re sitting in your office, you don't know what’s going on inside that person’s head.

The last point in bold is a fair one. But the first one is incorrect and means that by reserving judgment in all cases, one is bound to make errors—sometimes fatal ones. There’s a sense in which we all “create a character and put on a costume,” but Corgan is not talking about all people. He’s talking about psychopaths. As Mitchell puts it, regular people may engage in some of the behaviors that psychopaths do, but the extent to which psychopaths do so and the quality of such actions are enough to push predatory attributes and tactics into a qualitatively different level. More on this point below, where Mandel and Corgan revisit this point.

BC: Let me, can I ask you a question? (HM: Yeah.) Would you knowingly present yourself to the public in such a false way that you were rewarded for it with riches and fame at the cost of yourself?

HM: At the cost of myself? It depends what that cost is. Nothing comes without pain, and whether that’s mental anguish, whether that’s the fear of standing in front of an audience (BC: Okay.) and feel like at any given second you can be humiliated, I have learned to be somewhat comfortable and in control of my discomfort, and there isn’t a waking moment that I don’t feel discomfort. (BC: Interesting.) And I try to, you know, I didn’t, I had a very coddled, wonderful upbringing, like parents, very different than yours, but my own mental health was a mess and I didn’t have a friend, and I try to recapture the first time I went on stage as a dare, and I was terrified, and in that terror and in that moment, that was the only respite from all the the angst and other shit that I deal with. I try to recapture that every waking moment of my life to be able to take one step forward in this moment.

Mandel is basically describing what it’s like to be a relatively normal if excessively neurotic person. As Corgan observes below, he implicitly answered the question in the negative. Mandel doesn’t know what it means to adopt a fake persona for the purposes of self-gain and manipulating others to the point of their physical, mental, or spiritual destruction. It’s not in his own personal repertoire, so he seems to have difficulty accepting that it might be in others’.

BC: Right, so you answered your qu— you answered my question, which is, no, you wouldn’t, you see what I’m saying, you’re an authentic person. (HM: Yeah.) Play, we watch kids play, your daughter's with us, right, we watch kids play and we hear our kids doing funny voices, okay, that’s a natural human state to assume a state of being. A sociopath assumes whatever state of being is advantageous. That’s different. That’s what I’m saying, you’re not a sociopath.

HM: But doesn’t everybody? If, even going on on date, aren’t you creating an image of somebody?

BC: We all try to put our best foot forward.

HM: Is it a best foot forward, or is it a fake foot, you know, because your best foot is not really who you are, whether you’re a young lady who says, oh, I’m not hungry and I’m just going to chew a little piece of salad here, but you’re starved. I think we all are not…

BC: You’re being too nice, is what I’m saying. You’re being too nice.

Corgan is right. There’s a difference between “putting your best foot forward,” acting professionally in a business setting, or trying to act “grown up” as a parent in front of your kids, and adopting a fully crafted persona tailored for a specific audience of one or many, and to do so for many years with the intent of extracting useful resources out of them and then discarding or destroying them when those resources are used up.

Mandel is essentially implying that there’s no great difference between a girl pretending not to be hungry on a date and a serial killer who pretends to be the perfect match for a woman he just met and plans on raping and murdering later that night, or a con man who pretends to be your best friend in order to empty your bank account. The people Corgan is describing may not be serial killers, but they have the same “persistent predatory personality.” They have a drive for power, an entitled view of themselves, they’re vengeful and uncompromising, predatory and cruel, unwilling to accept responsibility, unremorseful, callous, and self-interested. They’re not damaged or hurting inside, like Mandel. They’re they type who see someone like Mandel and want to damage and hurt him some more, and who would enjoy doing so. The neurotic personality is basically the total opposite of the psychopathic personality.

HM: I dunno, I’m saying everybody’s fucked up, I don’t know that that’s nice.

BC: To answer a question you didn’t ask me, I see the world more cruelly, especially in this town. I’m more cynical, is what I’m trying to say.

Corgan is just seeing reality as it is.

HM: I think in this town, the blanket is off. You can’t, you know, being in show business gives you an excuse to be an asshole, to be crazy, you know, you could be like that, whereas if you’re in the middle of America, you’re from Chicago or whatever, I think in the midwest, if you’re working in an office, in a regular industry, you can’t, but to be an asshole and to be a rock star, you can be.

BC: They’re not mutually exclusive.

Corgan is right again. High-functioning psychopaths exist in all those areas. It just might be a bit easier in show business. Here’s how Karen Mitchell put it recently on X:

Dark personalities (narcissists/psychopaths), particularly those who are higher functioning, look & sound normal. They: are Mums & Dads, go to sports matches, do good deeds, are helpful, buy groceries at the store, eat at restaurants, seem kind, chat quite normally about their last holiday or their house renovations or their pets. They also happily destroy people emotionally, mentally, reputationally, socially, financially, professionally. In fact, they set out to destroy people long before their targets are aware of the pain they are eventually to endure. We need to get a whole lot better as a human race at understanding the red flags of dark personalities or the mass harm that is currently being inflicted on millions will continue & potentially increase in this world of globalization.

The conversation continues with Mandel’s daughter injecting an observation:

Jackelyn Shultz: I also think it’s kind of shifting with social media a little bit, like, people’s idea of celebrity is a little bit different than it used to be, even when I was growing up, and now people are enamored with the real life and authentic influencers that they see on social media, so people want authenticity. It’s not really a persona that they want anymore, and if they can tell it’s fake, they’re not really interested. Do you do you see that at all?

BC: I definitely see a shift towards that, but I also cynically see where people start pretending to be authentic, you know what I mean? They can’t help themselves. It just becomes another… again I’m cynical, so I’m not trying to put that on both of you.

Again, I don’t think Corgan is cynical. I would hazard a guess that because of his childhood experiences he has developed a degree of what Lobaczewski called “psychological immunity.” That is, he recognizes dynamics and personalities that others who lack that experience cannot. In another recent interview he hinted that this was the case, saying something like, having the experiences he had as a child, it was easier to go in a room with a psychopathic music industry executive and tell them fuck off when they tried to screw him over.

But on the point he actually made, yes, people prefer authenticity. Psychopaths, however, especially the high-functioning ones, have no problem appearing perfectly normal and authentic.