How do we understand the socio-historically unprecedented wave of evaluation which characterizes contemporary society? The article discusses five mental models that offer typical perspectives on evaluation. It is shown that each of them are also moral-political stances. The article discusses whether these stances too obviously reflect positions or “character masks” which characterize typical functional roles in modern organizations in relation to evaluation systems, thereby merely reproducing “folk tales” which already circulate in the evaluation society. The article discusses what would be required for a perspective on evaluation which takes evaluation seriously at the same time as the institutional and normative underpinnings under evaluation are kept open for democratic scrutiny