You are a Beautiful and Unique Snowflake

As much as I like Chuck Palahniuk, I'm a little sick of this oft repeated quote of his from Fight Club, namely: "You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake." It's used a lot on forums to justify the smashing down of people getting too insistent about their rights, or some percieved societal mistreatment. It's akin to the 'world's tiniest violin' in terms of responses, a demand for the recipient to suck it up and wade through the same shit as the rest of us. Well the problem with that is that - genetically speaking - you are unique. Compare your DNA sequence to that of any other organism on the planet, and you find remarkable variances throughout. You are one species in billions. One ethnic grouping within that species. One family within that grouping. One person in that family. Socially too. You could have a genetic lookalike on the other side of the planet, raised in a different society with different expectations. Even within the same city - a young artist born in Manhattan is going to have a very different life to one born in Washington Heights. And look at twins. The most similar at a genetic level that two organisms can get, put in the same social situation; but again, different reactions to different situations. True, you are not a snowflake. You are something better. You are the end result of a monumental accumulation of variables reacting and interacting over a span of time we can't even measure. All the material in your body was formed in the explosive birth of a star. You are more than a billion-to-one chance. And some people are happy to take that miracle made flesh and sit it at an office desk ticking 'no' on a form. Chuckling and nodding at every social inequality, shrugging their country away. What is it that makes some people so desperately crave the mundane, even to the extent that they would willingly force it on others?