Avoiding the obvious 'people are idiots' answer, I'll give you the real reason: life is messy and disordered. You can spend your whole life working towards something, only to realise you've been somebody else's puppet all along. Nobody can ever truly think their actions through, not completely. It's simply too much to ask. Life couldn't exist if people tried to do it. So they learn not to. They focus on certain consequences to filter out the noise. They focus only on their survival, on the well-beings of their friends and family, on their job, on the greater good—whatever it is. The focus that is necessary to function leads to a corresponding blindness to consequences lying outside that. Hence the problem. Not an inherent evil, but a dangerous, potentially self-destructive blindness.

[He is thinking a little bit about Gaheris here.]

I'm talking generalities here, of course. Some people are idiots, and others simply don't care.

If that was what you were asking? [When Heero gives a monosyllable question, Braxiatel picks the subject that seems most fruitful and rolls with it.]