Abstract
Following the book Lucifer Effect written by the American social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, the study explores his central idea that human character can be easily manipulated and corrupted by force of 'total situations'and 'systems' and that 'banal/ordinary' good and 'banal' evil are closely interlinked. Zimbardo's position is confronted with the Catholic teaching of the 'social' and 'structural sin' and followed up by a broader philosophical reflection on the phenomenon of 'structural sin'in modern and postmodern historical contexts.
The idea of structural sin is developer into a hermeneutically interpreted category of a destructive 'existential movement' on the boundary of personal and institutionally mediated human relationships.