Life & Wisdom Quote by Laurence J. Peter

Competence, in Laurence J. Peter's hands, gets demoted from a measurable skill to a social hallucination. The line works because it smuggles a bureaucratic indictment into a tidy epigram: we treat ability as objective right up until the moment someone threatens the hierarchy, at which point "competence" becomes a vibe, a narrative, a performance review.

Peter, best known for the Peter Principle (people rising to their level of incompetence), is aiming at the machinery of modern institutions, where promotions and prestige depend less on what you can do than on what your bosses, peers, and org charts can recognize. Pairing competence with "truth" and "beauty" is a sly escalation. Those are famously contested ideas, the kind you argue about in philosophy seminars or art criticism. Sliding competence into that lineup suggests the office runs on the same shaky epistemology as aesthetics: authority and taste decide what counts.

Then comes the snap of "contact lenses". It's a punchline with teeth. Contact lenses are literally in the eye, but they're also corrective, artificial, and sometimes cosmetic. That extra image implies the beholder isn't a neutral judge; they're equipped with filters: biases, incentives, corporate politics, favoritism, and fashionable managerial theories. Competence can be mis-seen, overcorrected, or simply worn for effect.

The context is late-20th-century white-collar life, where "meritocracy" became a comforting story even as organizations rewarded conformity, presentation, and risk avoidance. Peter's intent isn't to deny real skill; it's to warn that in systems built on perception, competence is often whatever power decides it is.