My fourth black hole is staffed by self appointed leaders of men.

In 1945 as 2740559 Guardsman Carter I used to slip away from our training camp on Sandown race course on Sunday mornings and go to the Baptist chapel in Esher . I well remember one verse of a hymn

Direct control suggest this day, All I design or do or say, That all my powers in all their might, To thy sole glory may unite

This matched my new found sense of belonging, my oath to obey the king as it was then and his officers. Mine was not to make reply nor reason why but to do and die.

Normals are those who pay the piper and call the tune and we, the other ranks, are those who play their tune and are essentially at their beck and call. They hire us and they can fire us or send us into battle or black mark our records unless we live up to their expectations.

That stigmatisation is so much more than we might imagine. To escape it or even glimpse its horror is the root of the catastrophic decent into hell. Becoming Human insists that we can go to that place and god won't send a thunderbolt nor will the world stop turning - but we do need new friends and new ideas with which we will, slowly, become confident that we are loveable and credible and what we bring to life is good.

But my Eton educated and much saluted Guards officers see themselves as preferred, even ideal people. As officers and gentlemen they see the rest of us, other ranks, ultimately as cannon fodder and expendable.

As a child in Bloxworth, an almost feudal village in Dorset , Capt. Lane was the landlord, my father was the tenant farmer and those he employed were the men. In that peck order we all knew our place. Seventy years on and little has changed.

Enterprising industrialists and investors see us as workers to whom they 'give' jobs. Calling us human resource is a cop out. To property developers we are tenants to whom they rent houses farms and factories. Little has changed.

We're still obedient to an enlarged ruling class only now they seduce us with talk of never having had it so good. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said it in the 60's but we're having it again whilst now we're in chains to record levels of state approved and encouraged personal debt.

Goffman (page lix) suggests we who are stigmatised 'must engage in self presentation but of a different sort. Instead of trying to present ourselves favourably we are required to present ourselves in a way that indicates we accept our inferior status and don't intend to make claims to full-fledged humanity by treading on ground reserved for 'Normals'. And it protects them from challenge'.

The employer is such a man; if he used his common sense and wanted to he could ask the cost of recruiting and keeping a staff who chafe at their lot and stay in such depressing environments. He could ask of the resentment the staff feel in trying to do the impossible day in day out. But that would make him vulnerable and with his status, pension and stock options to defend he prefers to employ consultants, whatever they cost, to let him off the hook. He can then plead innocent to charges of neglect and waste and knowledge of what it's really like to work on the shop floor, week after week.

But widening the use of stigmatised in this way opens a whole can of worms. We all do it. Look down your nose on another or pull the wool over his eyes, ridicule or belittle him and you stigmatise him. It becomes imprinted and almost indelible and is not easily forgotten or forgiven. In playing the role of a 'Normal' even for a second you are his not-friend, his enemy.