We're Cannibals—But We Only Eat Each Other
A ramble about Online™
A rule about families is that when you’re arguing about something, you’re probably arguing about something else. The fight is rarely about the thing—it’s about everything beneath it. In theater, this often manifests as a character arriving from outside the family whose presence sets off a cascade of conflicts rooted in the family’s own dysfunction.
But these stories aren’t just about families. They’re about what family means—about intimacy, projection, vulnerability, and the peculiar way love makes people cruel. And they scale. These dynamics don’t stop at blood. They govern our friendships, our communities, and now—thanks to social media—our entire online lives. We act out family drama on a global stage. We eat the people closest to us.
A classic theatrical example of this is Peter Shaffer’s Five Finger Exercise, a play about a postwar English family.
The father is a businessman; the mother, a frustrated would-be social climber. They have two children: a rebellious son, home from university, and a younger daughter. They all hate each other and are miserable for reasons that only fully emerge after the arrival of a math tutor who comes to stay.
The son prophetically warns the tutor: “This isn’t a family. It’s a tribe of wild cannibals. Between us, we eat everything we can.”
And that’s basically what happens. The tutor catalyzes the drama, and each family member ends up passing him around like an emotional mutton chop. (Spoiler: he eventually tries to commit suicide.)
I say “sort of” because the cannibalism isn’t intentional. The family doesn’t mean to hurt the tutor. They don’t even really see him. They think they care—at various times, the son believes he’s in love with him, the mother considers having an affair—but it’s all projection. When he tries to kill himself, they have a sudden, jarring realization: Oh no. We’ve been using the help as props.
But again—this isn’t about “family.” It’s about the way intimacy distorts perception, and how people treat others as tools to process their own emotions. That dynamic exists wherever closeness exists. And when it breaks down, you get cannibalism.
In Exercise, the tutor’s suicide attempt forces the family to wake up. It jolts them into seeing him not as a mirror but as a person—one who might, perhaps, be part of their community.
By community, I don’t mean your neighbors. I mean the people you care about—or think you do. Community is where consequences live. It’s where actions land. It’s the place where hurt matters—where people can be both callous and devastated, because they care.
We’ve built platforms that simulate closeness without trust—and that’s where things go bad.
One of my favorite films about families is Anthony Harvey’s Oscar-winning adaptation of James Goldman’s play The Lion in Winter. Peter O’Toole is Henry II; Katharine Hepburn is his imprisoned queen, Eleanor. They spend Christmas at Chinon with their three sons, arguing over who will inherit the crown. But while they’re ostensibly arguing about politics, they’re really arguing about family—resentments, love, betrayal, pride.
Three things elevate Lion above the usual crown-and-dagger fare:
The cast is stacked. Hepburn won her third Oscar.
The script, based on Goldman’s play, is densely witty and sounds plausibly archaic, even though it’s structurally modern: tight, cutting, conversational.
The themes. Beneath the plotting and politicking is a deeply dysfunctional family. They delight in hurting, besting, and impressing each other. Because though they hate each other, no one else matters.
As in Five Finger Exercise, an outsider kicks things into motion: Timothy Dalton’s Philip, the young King of France. He’s there to negotiate peace by marrying off his sister, but that’s just the pretext. Maybe they’ll get peace. Maybe they’ll get war. Nobody really cares.
The difference is that Philip isn’t the point. He’s important to the plot and to Richard, but the audience isn’t meant to identify with him. The Lion in Winter never wavers about who the emotional stakes belong to. The family talks to us as if we are them. It’s all internal.
Exercise, by contrast, uses the tutor as a rhetorical object—until he shatters that role. That’s when the cannibalism stops being metaphorical and starts having real cost.
Consider one of Lion’s most famous scenes, which momentarily deviates from my “only family matters” thesis. Philip reveals that he had an affair with Richard—just to hurt Henry.
Philip: You — you made my father nothing. You humiliated him, beat him down in every war, bellied with his wife… and you made him love you for it. I was there. His last words were to you.
Henry: He was a loving man, and you’ve learned nothing from him.
Philip: I’ve learned how much fathers live in sons…
(He tells the story of seducing Richard—just so he could one day tell Henry about it.)
Richard [bursting from behind the curtain]: No! It wasn’t like that!
Philip [coldly]: Oh, but it was.
Philip seduces Richard not out of love, but out of spite—for the father, not the son. He weaponizes their vulnerabilities: Richard’s longing for paternal love, Henry’s love for his son. He isn’t part of their family. He doesn’t want anything from them but damage.
And that’s what makes family drama hit so hard. You love your family more than anyone else. You want them to respond to you more than anyone else. And other people know that.
But this truth isn’t limited to family. It’s true of communities. It’s true of friends. And it’s grotesquely true online, where people you’ve never met can simulate proximity and use that closeness to devastate you. It’s why we support dumbshit. It’s why betrayal feels existential. We’ve confused intimacy with reach — with the illusion that just because someone sees us, they know us.
Once you accept that your family is your community—and that your community has expanded via social media to include 100,000 people at Chinon, all watching, judging, reacting—it gets a lot harder to act wisely. So we should just be nicer to each other.
Online, we’re all cannibals.
But don’t worry.
We only eat each other.