Given the right horrific circumstances, every human being is capable of eating another human being. We live with this hard to digest fact the same way we live with the certainty of our own death: by putting it out of mind as much as possible.

We are social creatures, human babies are more helpless than most baby animals and need the most care if they are to survive. We feel tenderness toward babies, even if they are strangers to us, and most of us have a reflex to leap to their defense if we see one toddling into traffic. At the same time, we are also programmed to survive.

In my first semester in law school we read a British case from the height of the British empire, Regina v. Dudley and Stephens. Dudley and Stephens, sailors, had survived a shipwreck with two other guys, one being the teenaged cabin boy. There were four of them, barely alive in the lifeboat in a remote area of the ocean, day after day. The kid was close to death, but hanging on. Reasoning that the boy was going to die very soon anyway, and that they’d all die if they didn’t eat him, two, Dudley and Stephens, voted to kill the boy. They killed him, over the moral objections of the third, and all three men ate and were eventually rescued. The principled cannibal gave evidence in the criminal case against Dudley and Stephens, who were sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead.

The verdict was designed to send a message to the civilized British navy. You cannot eat the cabin boy until he is dead of natural causes. Once that lesson was imparted, the queen (Regina) quietly commuted the death sentences of Dudley and Stephens and that was that.

In real life, recently, I have seen this impulse toward cannibalism among friends I’ve had for decades. When you are under enough stress, and feel desperate enough, you will believe any lie that makes you feel alive, part of a loving group and righteous in your shared fury. It is a short trip, step by step, from angrily denouncing someone, based on an ugly lie, to hating them, to hanging them from a tree, to eating their barbecued corpse.

We are all capable of this kind of abominable group behavior, in an extreme enough situation, but some are able to do it even when there is no direct threat to their own life. I don’t want to sound judgmental, God forbid, but my best advice is to avoid this kind of grimly transactional motherfucker, once you see that hungry gleam in their beady eyes.