Aristotle's Assumption

Aristotle makes a fair number of assumptions in his Rhetoric, and those assumptions are primarily the things I have questions on.

He assumes that the true or just will always be more persuasive than the false or unjust. While I like this belief because it gives a real value to rhetoric, I find it difficult to believe sometimes. People seem to ascribe to a lot of beliefs that seems false or unjust. They make arguments in defense of these beliefs, and often seem to have great success in making them. Is this really explanable as a situation that people articulating arguments in support of the true or just are just making really bad arguments? Mein Kampf makes arguments that seem at the very least unjust to most people today, and yet, when it was written, many people were persuaded. Was no one making any half way decent arguments against this in Germany prior to the Nazi's taking power?

One assumption that I easily agree with is that no one admits that their arguments are for the more harmful as opposed to less harmful, that they are arguing for the worse instead of the better situation or case. Whether they believe that their argument will create more harm than good is not whats important. What is important is that to persuade, they need to appear to be arguing for less harm, for the better case.

The psychological assumptions based on what kinds of emotional appeal to use for an audience on what particular age and gender appear to be overgeneralized to me. They might be useful as a methodological starting point in framing an argument, but they don't seem to be a great place to begin a psychological understanding of people.

I (along with I suspect many others) question as to whether logical arguments are really the most persuasive. Having said that, I do think is basic frame work is right, the available proofs really do boil down to logical, emotional and ethical/character based. What I think needs to be expanded upon is logical proofs. Far too often, premises in a logical argument are not based on being necessarily or probabilistically true. Instead, they seem to just be based on ideology or mythology. People accept articulated or inarticulated premises based on ideology far too readily, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. This I think is where Aristotle is lacking. His logical proofs don't really seem to acknowledge that people can and will ascribe to false premises on an ideological basis.