Where has this lie come from? "Higher functioning" countries generally stem from countries that were doing well long before they met many other countries. The British invented naval clocks, required to circumnavigate the globe, before they went round the globe on a regular basis. How did they do that if everyone was equal before they met?
I think the OP's question is how did Britain get it a position where it had the capability to "systematically plunder the rest of the world"?
Do you think that was luck? Were the British simply "evil", and everyone else not so? One has to assume they were already high-functioning, prior to the plundering.
- be colonised by the Romans 2000 years ago
- spend the next 1000 years rediscovering and (eventually) surpassing the Romans' achievements
- invest heavily in education (when the Incas were building their monuments, most of Oxford University had already been constructed) and subsequently have 1000 years of cumulative effect of those investments
- be highly connected to Western Europe, with all the continual advancements shared between countries all trying to outdo each other
- be an island nation, with a seafaring tradition that was accelerated by all of the above to the point of being the best in the world
Probably in 50 or 100 years there will be some Afghan nationalist movement which will be telling everyone that the entirety of US wealth is based on plunder of Afghanistan. That's roughly how it is with India nationalists and Britain today, but of course, it is nonsense.