“To my mentor Fronto I owe the realization that malice, craftiness, and duplicity are the concomitants of absolute power; and that our patrician families tend for the most part to be lacking in the feelings of ordinary humanity.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, written not quite 2,000 years ago.
Freedom has been rare on most of the planet, for most of history, outside of course of those places where sufficient space made central authority difficult to impose.
In general, though, it is hard to say we have been substantially better than chimpanzees.
But good things happen when you feed the good. Our problem, right now, is that nearly no one is feeding the good. We are feeding the banal, the spurious, the sentimental, and more than anything the vanity of most people who are too stupid to see or feel the difference.