Comment Re:Good start, now.... (Score 2) 90
You'll find that the academic system is not as elitist as you would think, at least not in countries where the barriers to entry are low. It only takes a few years to work through a basic degree, and if you have any ability, you can soon move beyond that to real research and contributions.
The reality in academia is that you can put up any ideas at all, and the peer-reviewed journals have a huge diversity of contributors. Sometimes the strongest papers are those that argue an idea to its logical extreme; although reality is usually shades of gray, this diversity of ideas all add insight.
The reason why academia may reject certain ideas is not because the ideas are radical (there are a myriad ideas in the university context), but because those ideas have not been thought through. There is no substitute for years of developing an idea and a coherent presentation of it.
I don't want to gild the lily here; there are many contexts which make it hard for someone to participate in academia, whether for economic reasons or time commitments. But that's a social reality. If many people don't have "a room of one's own" as Virginia Woolf put it, then we have to push for more than changes in the academies; we have to push for fundamental social reform.