Majority of people are sleep-walking as machines driven by imitation, habit and external forces. We live in a dreamlike, mechanical state lacking the awareness of this itself. apropos: Gurdjieff
Are they rote-students imitating or copying memes and as such are driven by inadequate-ideas or are they students who understand the subject from its first assumptions and as such are driven by adequate-ideas. In the quote above, the suggestion is that majority are rote-students.
Even if someone never becomes sufficiently interested to dig deeper into some academic subject and sticks to imitating, I wouldn’t say they are somehow worse and have no awareness. They may have other interests and joys in life, there’s many fulfilling things outside academia. Why would you expect everybody to be like you?
This carries over to animals, to a degree. A dog is social to an extent that many would consider it conscious. An octopus is legally recognised as sentient in some countries—thanks to it behaving in a way that is vaguely reminiscent of ourselves. Same reason we call ravens smart.
Most humans anywhere on the planet share enough cultural baggage that we do not question whether others have what we consider consciousness; though I think some people are more sensitive to how much shared cultural baggage another human possesses, the small lack of which could lead to fear, cautiousness, and/or a feeling that they are in some ways subhuman (closer than a dog, but not as human as their peers in local community) relative to them, which eventually contributes to racism and so on.
[0] Arguably, “behaving sufficiently like a human while being not human at all”, which we have plenty of examples of now in the last year or two, is another such trope.