What happened to human civilization?

There has always been some sort of hierarchy that puts down the majority of people though. However, back in those days it was really easy to point fingers towards the tyrants. Since then humans have evolved a lot in terms of the way they think and the knowledge they produce. Slavery was for the most part abolished and in words of Thomas Friedman the world has become flatter in terms of equal opportunities of commercial competition for most of the countries (Of course almost 90% of Africa is out of that game, maybe we should say the the world is somewhat flat). In any case, the point I am trying to make today is that nowadays we have far more tyrants than in the ancient times. However, this times it not so easy to point our fingers at them. Of course there are many that we can identify very quick. But for the most part I think we do not even know who are our worse enemies... perhaps it is ourselves that like to live a comfortable crappy systematic life...