Are widely held view are often wrong, or are such views more likely to be correct?

(Note: Many facts in the following passage may be untrue)

 The history of science is checkered with wrong, but widely held hypothesis and, theories that were true, however suppressed and unaccepted. But wrong widely held views are not just limited to science, but approaches to other different ethnic groups, geography, history, economics and many more. And so, I believe that widely held beliefs are often wrong.

  The Ptolemaic model of the solar system showed that the Earth was in the middle of the solar system. These theory was widely accepted, until the 16th century, when a polish man called Nicolaus Copernicus, proposed a plan of the solar system, in which the Sun was at the centre, not Earth. This model of the solar system went totally against the model of the solar system of at that time, which featured the Earth as the centre of the Solar System. The general public, the Church, and the Scientific community refused to accept this theory until many years. Not much later, an Italian scientific, named Galileo Galilei reaffirmed Copernicus theory that was Earth was not at the middle of the solar system, but Sun. He showed this by proving that Jupiter did not circle the Earth but Sun and hence Sun is at the the centre of the solar system. Unfortunately, even after demonstrating the prove of this hypothesis in front of hundreds scholars, scientists and other respectable members of public, his theory was condemned by the Church and then he was held under house arrest by the Italian Government. Galilei spent the last days of his life, in his house alone, for speaking the truth.

  Between the 1930s and the 1940s, a horrific event took place, The holocaust. The result of the beastly persecution of minorities don't just signify the disastrous consequences persecution can have, but that how wrong widely held views can be. For people who don't know what the Holocaust was, it was the persecution of mainly jewish people in Germany and the countries it had acquired in the World War Two, and gypsies  disabled people, black people and political opponents of the Nazi Party (the party that was governing Germany at that time). In short, all non-aryan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan) people were prosecuted against, brutally. They were first send to cramped, rotten township called Ghettos. In the Ghettos, life was comparable to hell, and many people died there itself. Then, when the time came to clear the Ghetto, the people were forced into a train, and whisked off to the life terminating, concentration camps. The train themselves were horrid, there were no sanitation, place to sit and lack of oxygen. Many people died in the train. Later, when the survivors reached the concentration camps, the people who were unfit to do physical work were killed, and the rest were put to work, and were given minimal food. When these people became unfit to work, they were put into gas chambers, and their life was terminated. The widely held belief in Germany that the non-aryans were not deserving enough led to the death of 11 million people. That is one 1/6th of UK. Once again, we can see that widely held beliefs can be wrong.

  Another famous example of a widely held belief is that pre 2007, it was said that the economy was strong and that a recession was in no way inevitable or likely to happen (this was a consensus even amongst the experts in the field). However, one year later, consumers and borrowers were shocked and forced into a frenzy as multiple banks claimed bankruptcy, most notably the bankruptcy of Lehman brothers, and many bankers lost their well-paid jobs along with their executives. Governments were forced to use the public's money to pay for the bailing of big banks, or otherwise the bankruptcy of such banks would be detrimental to the economy, both nationally and worldwidely. A frantic game of blame and started, and the after-effects of the recession are still felt by the public, as UK entered the triple-dip recession  after experiencing the double-dip recession last year (2012), and countries in Eurozone (such as Greece and Cyprus) seem to be in the endless loop of bailing-outs and budget cuts, meanwhile the relatively stronger countries of the Eurozone, especially Germany, seek ways to negotiate their neighbours out of this fatal economic crisis. America, the country who until now have been known for being economically strong, face the downward slope of the daunting fiscal cliff, which may lead to an abyss that they may not be able to extricate themselves out of; for some time. Again, we see that that widely held beliefs are often wrong.     

  In conclusion, I reaffirm my statement that  that widely held beliefs are often wrong as proven by the paragraph.