The Balance Between Idealism and Commerce

I have been wrestling lately with how to have my writing published.
I originally thought that if I had good ideas, publishing would not be that hard. In my efforts to find an agent and a publisher, I have come to realize that publishing is a business, something I naively ignoried before. Publishing seems to be more about selling books and making money than about disseminating ideas and enriching people's lives. Not that the two are necessarily incompatible, but commerce seems to be the priority for publishing houses. I guess this should not have come as a surprise to me. The challenge I see for myself is how to make my writing challenging to people's thinking as well as being commercially successful without focusing entirely on commerce. This does not seem easy, at least for me, but others have done it and I will try to understand how they have.