The worst aspects of human behavior, to me, are what we take for granted, when we are so buffered from reality that we don't even realize just how priviliged we are.
It seems to me that to have an over-abundance of money is never a good thing for anyone. It leads only to arrogance and power tripping.
I grew up in what is now a very rich area in San Diego---not because my family was rich, although we certainly were not poor---but because my grandfather, who had lived there since when there were once unoccupied canyons down the street filled with coyotes, owned the property and passed it onto my parents before the property value skyrocketed all around us. It once had been a fairly normal, quiet neighborhood, albeit well-off, nestled near to the ocean on a mountain-top, and distant from the noisy bustle of the inland city. But by the time I was in middle school, the scene was already irreversibly shifted in one inevitable direction: fervent clueless hopelessly rich people and their spoiled children.
The high school I attended was dominated by kids whose parents bought them cell-phones (back in the days before they were ubiquitous) and Jeep Cherokees.
I had always been aware of something fake and somewhat sinister in my surroundings. But this socio-economic awareness didn't truly manifest itself until I went to college in Los Angeles. Once again, I found myself in a ridiculously wealthy location (Westwood), in a city dominated by glamorous and fashionable people all pretending to be rich, even if only living off credit and the everpresent LA ambition to be famous. But in Los Angeles, it's hard to hide the underworld of poverty, homelessness, and have-nots, when you only have to walk several blocks from any rich area to suddenly and jarringly be immersed in a ghetto.
I think one of my awakening moments was when I was downtown, walking by a gigantic monolithic apartment complex that looked like a gated fortress, and obviously had been intentionally designed to give that impression. And outside of its impenetrably wealthy gates stood a line of cardboard houses. Wealthy people slipped out of their gated ramifications in sleek tinted cars and drove away to lose themselves in some other completely wealthy segment of town.
And then other things began to become apparent: bus stop benches designed to prevent anyone from laying down comfortably on them; militant cops cordoning in the unwanteds and confining them to their designated sectors; fortress tower lifestyles, mentalities, cars, and buildings, all designed to keep those who didn't fit into the American dream out, by any means necessary.
That's when I began to realize what kind of country I lived in. And I was angry. But I also felt empowered, to know why I had never felt comfortable with where I had grown up, to understand that wealth is a dangerous and corrupting thing. At that time in the fire of youth, mostly what I wanted to do was throw molotov cocktails at cops and overthrow the capitalist regime through intellectual and humanist arguments.
I have changed a lot since then, as well as my political ideologies, and I no longer pretend that I am an anarchist in spirit---but I have never lost that basic distaste for those with wealth: the priviliged, arrogant, and complacent upper classes. I have worked a number of jobs now where my primary customers are just such people. And they generally instill pity in me. To be priviliged essentially means that you are blinded, by necessity, to reality. You are buffered from suffering, and you are embedded in artifice and pretense to justify that privilige.
Could you be rich, and be uncorrupted? I don't believe so. Because you will begin to take things for granted. You will take it for granted because you no longer have to be impacted by costs that most other people are affected by everyday. You can afford to buy bottled water from a distant asian island. You can afford to drive an SUV that wastes a nonrenewable resource and endangers pedestrians on suburban streets.
But this also isn't to say that money itself is the only corruptor. I would go further, and say that the very mentality of privilige.