At what point did we as a species decide wealth and power were more important than empathy and decency?

It’s always been there - Jefferson called it “the general tendency of the rich to prey up the poor” - but it became unrestrained and socially permissible (“Greed is good”) in the 1980’s.

I like this answer very much. Funny how my Western education classified any pre-patriarchal civilizations as primitive, when they were the ones that were actually civilized.