Competence, like truth, beauty, and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.

Peter’s quip plays on the familiar saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” extending it to “competence” and adding the absurdly literal “contact lenses.” The joke underscores a serious point associated with Peter’s broader critique of bureaucracies: judgments of ability are often subjective, contingent on the evaluator’s expectations, incentives, and limited perspective. By pairing an abstract ideal (truth) with an aesthetic one (beauty) and then a mundane object (contact lenses), he highlights how perception mediates everything from lofty claims to everyday experience. The line suggests that what organizations label “competent” may reflect the observer’s biases more than any stable, objective measure of performance.