There’s nothing like a little bit of social science to explain our inner thoughts and frustration to us. Today’s topic: the hatred that society has conjured for “hipsters.”

Now, being a hipster is not a new thing, trending as it may be right now. No, “hipsters” – as people who identify with a counter-cultural way of life, challenging the mainstream norms and living on the fringes – have been around for quite a number of decades. Without getting into too much of a history lesson (it is Monday and no one has really accepted that the weekend is over yet) the terms used for this “hipster” way of life have evolved through the ages and those who exist on the fringes of society have always been the scapegoats for… well everyone really.

Scapegoats may seem like random victims, because they are (by definition) not responsible for the evils attributed to them. But the choice of a scapegoat is never really arbitrary, as scholar René Girard has shown in his classic study of the phenomenon. The scapegoat is invariably an outsider, existing at the margins of a community, and resisting its core values.

In an uncanny way, that describes the precise definition of the hipster, when the term first appeared in the American vocabulary.

Skipping ahead in the theory slightly, we come to a point where hipsters are destroying the very things they stand for in a completely contradictory set of stereotypes attributed to an invisible set of people. The Daily Beast suggests that they are invisible because… dum dum dum! Hipsters do not actually exist. They are a figment of our imaginations, constructed so that we have someone to blame for everything that goes wrong.

And that, folks is why we hate these hard-done by mythical figures and glide between us, unnoticed but blamed for everything. Scapegoats!

For the full details on how we got to this conclusion, check out The Daily Beast.