Reddit mentions of The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

They don't have anything to do with Canadian politics specifically but two very interesting books that I just finished.

1. Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama
   
   
2. The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond
   
   Diamond's new book has opened my eyes on the value which traditional societies can provide to modern one's today. A really thought provoking book. Fukuyama is one of my most trusted authors on topics including sociology and historical development, the book focuses on political institutions and their development specifically through China and the Middle East (because that was where it all started).

First, for a proper, basic understanding of what makes people happy on the most fundamental level, and what social structures support that best, I think anthropology is a good place to start. I recommend The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond, which is an overview of modern primitive societies suggesting the social structures humans evolved. The idea is that anything contrary to the evolved structure risks being contrary to the human organism itself, and thus can be a cause of stress. Specifically, daily life in "Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic" (WEIRD) societies is in fact an aberration compared to how we evolved to live.

Obviously, any return to primitivism would be absurd, so next you would want to look into sociology, political science, psychology, and any number of other sciences to figure out how to apply just the benefits of primitive social structures in a modern, progressive, open society manner that guarantees human rights and diversity.

Personally, I think that the way humans will organize themselves in the future, assuming we even survive the next few centuries, will be a global network of massively distributed communities, each small in population and run via direct democracy, which is reminiscent of tribal social structures, but with all the benefits of the modern Internet, technology, medicine, science, etc.

Edit: mobile app messed up the formatting

Evolutionary there's advantage in exterminating males (including male children) and abduct and rape the females during wars.

See e.g. http://www.amazon.com/The-World-Until-Yesterday-Traditional/dp/0670024813 for a description of an environment we've evolved to fit into.