(7) I think where we're going wrong in this discussion - which is partly my fault for the way I worded my original post - is in thinking about an individual's class characteristics. Imagine a factory with ten managers and one hundred subordinates. "Manager" and "subordinate" are classes whether or not there's a lot of upward and downward mobility, and whether or not individuals self-identify emotionally with the categories "manager" and "subordinate." Yet I'd call "freak" a class (albeit an unstable one) precisely because people want to identify with it or identify against it, and therefore "freak" has social force, can pull people towards it or away from it and can disrupt other social groups. What the group "freak" and the group "manager" have in common is power - and "burnout" has power too. And this is true even if as individuals we can fall in and out of the group and in and out of power. (And then of course there are power relations within groups. Think of the leader of the burnout pack [lots of power] as opposed to a marginal prep [little power, for the time being, even though the marginal prep has a better chance of getting into college].)