We're very complicated when it comes to motivation.
Between our religious lives, our social and familial lives, our professional or entrepreneurial pursuits, our role in communities and societies, our romantic relationships, our roles as parents, and especially internal desires and wishes—it's fairly easy to see why asking questions about motivation could be complicated.
Humans are bio-genetically engineered for things like community, duty, career, relationship and even religion, or at least, we're built with the ability to practice religious devotion to concepts and goals that transcend ourselves. These are all combined and harmonized in the person, and so their motivation is the complex network of impulses that they feel for all the constituent parts of their sense of self.
Foreign beliefs tend to be easily dismissed, but we ought not throw them away.
For Latour, it is wrong to use relativism to ignore or invalidate the religious, social, and emotional life of a person. Instead, relativism can be used to foster spaces for subjects to demonstrate their true selfhood, with all their assumptions intact—not because Latour agrees with each person's views, but because it is impossible to truly know a person without at least understanding their lives from their subjective points of view. In other words, Latour's sociology is one of high empathy.
Because of relativism, ontology must be subjective.
On a related note, Latour also understands ontology as something of a misnomer. Instead of focusing on ontology as a path to objectivity, Latour reverses the order. This means that he first subjectifies the experience of the person in question, or rather, he acknowledges the subjective nature of experience, as a thing that proceeds 'ontology,' since, after all, Latour's own understanding of ontology would belong to his subjective point of view.
All that to say, the book argues that a true study of what exists is actually more like a study of what everyone assumes about existence. It's a collection and re-orchestration of all of our subjective points of view together.
People are essentially actors playing roles they intuitively understand.
This idea is not new, but Latour does speak to it clearly and helpfully, but essentially, the gist is this: When humans are growing up, they come to understand themselves as participants in systems like religion and civic identity. These systems have their own modes by which each individual participates in the social structure. In other words, each person is programmed to believe that they have certain obligations for their time on earth, and by studying those assumptions, Latour discovers a sense for what the combined effect of each person's belief systems might feel like.
The correct way to study a subject is to let them be the expert on themselves.
This is also a fairly common idea in psychotherapy right now, but it's important in sociological or philosophical endeavors. Imagine a cynical conversation with a religious fundamentalist. The cynic might say, "You don't believe in God. You just pretend to believe in God." By dismissing the views of the religious person, the cynic has attempted to invalidate the perspective of the other, so a study of people won't be complete that way, because it removes the opinions and beliefs of those who form their identity in different ways. In other words, in order to be scientific, one has to acknowledge their own bias and allow others to explain life however it appears to them.
