The Chilling Playbook Of Power-Hungry Leaders…

Orren Prunckun
4 min readJan 22, 2025

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When you ask ChatGPT “If you were a power and money-hungry narcissist who ran a country. What would you implement?” here is what you get:

• Strict regulation of media and social platforms to control the narrative.
• Promote propaganda highlighting my leadership as essential to stability and prosperity.
• Censor dissenting voices and penalise whistle-blowers.
• Implement a tax structure that benefits the wealthy class, ensuring loyalty from elites.
• Offer tax incentives to businesses that directly support your regime.
• Levy heavy consumption taxes on luxury goods to project an image of fairness while ensuring revenue.
• Encourage a visible but manageable gap between social classes to create dependency on the government.
• Provide basic social services to pacify lower classes while reserving privileges for elites.
• Implement widespread surveillance under the guise of national security.
• Use biometric ID systems to monitor and control citizens.
• Ensure essential services (like healthcare, food supply, and housing) are tied to government programs to maintain control.
• Centralise key industries under state control or in partnerships with loyal oligarchs.
• Introduce laws that make it easy to criminalise opposition while giving immunity to loyalists.
• Maintain a legal façade of fairness but use selective enforcement to target threats.
• Promote cultural or ideological divisions to prevent unified opposition.
• Create controlled opposition groups to deflect attention from systemic issues.
• Control the education system to teach loyalty to the regime and suppress critical thinking.
• Rewrite history to glorify the regime and vilify previous leadership or dissenting ideologies.
• Limit the population’s ability to leave the country or move between regions without permits.
• Ensure borders are controlled to prevent external influences or escapes.
• Promote materialism to distract the population from governance issues.
• Provide credit or incentives for spending rather than saving, keeping citizens financially dependent.
• Establish symbols and rituals to reinforce loyalty to the leadership.
• Manipulate the economy to create cycles of inflation and deflation that disempower the middle class while strengthening the elite’s purchasing power.
• Encourage citizens and small businesses to take on debt, creating financial dependency on the state or loyal banks.
• Use celebrities, sports, and entertainment to keep the population distracted from political issues.
• Reward citizens for reporting “unpatriotic” behaviour, encouraging self-policing within communities.
• Maintain a constant show of force in public areas to intimidate dissenters.
• Equip the police force with military-grade weapons to suppress uprisings swiftly.
• Invent or exaggerate foreign threats to justify draconian measures and maintain public fear.
• Engineer economic or social crises that position the government as the saviour, ensuring dependence and gratitude.
• Offer token reforms to appease growing discontent without making substantive changes.
• Justify monitoring all internet traffic under the guise of preventing cyberattacks or terrorism.
• Use environmental concerns to impose taxes on the populace while exempting state-owned enterprises and loyalists.
• Exploit health crises to enforce emergency powers, restrict movement, and monitor citizens.
• Use vaccination programs or health passports as tools of control, limiting access for non-compliance.
• Encourage gig work models that provide minimal worker rights, increasing reliance on state-controlled benefits for survival.
• Develop infrastructure only in areas that are politically loyal, neglecting dissenting regions.
• Push for cashless economies where every transaction is monitored and traceable.
• Freeze accounts or deny financial access to individuals deemed “undesirable.”
• Expand student loan programs but make repayment tied to government-approved jobs or loyalty programs.
• Mandate national holidays, parades, or public oaths of allegiance to reinforce obedience and pride in the regime.
• Use lotteries or contests to create the illusion of opportunity.
• Periodically announce reforms or rewards that are never fully realised to maintain false hope and prevent rebellion.
• Position the government as the only entity capable of solving crises.
• Promote or ghettoise specific cultural or ethnic groups to control their influence and activity.
• Regularly remind citizens of the potential dangers (real or fabricated) they are protected from by the regime, fostering dependence.
• Require public displays of gratitude to the regime, such as pledges, written statements, or participation in “thanksgiving” events.
• Create an overwhelming legal system that only the state can navigate, ensuring ordinary citizens remain vulnerable to prosecution.
• Use healthcare as a surveillance tool by monitoring individuals’ mental and physical health.
• Introduce laws governing personal relationships, such as de facto partnerships.
• Maintain a level of poverty in strategic areas to ensure citizens are too focused on survival to organise resistance.
• Implement policies (e.g., quantitative easing, inflation) that erode savings, making citizens dependent on the state for financial stability.
• Penalise or tax hoarding of precious metals, cryptocurrencies, or other alternative assets.
• Populate key regions with loyal citizens to cement control over voting behaviours.
• Ban or restrict access to foreign technology, apps, or platforms to limit exposure to alternative ideas.
• Seize or influence critical resources in other countries to gain leverage internationally and distract domestic populations with foreign “victories.”
• Overwhelm citizens with frequent but minor rule changes or enforcement campaigns, creating compliance through exhaustion.

Everything on here has either been discussed or implemented.

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Orren Prunckun
Orren Prunckun

Written by Orren Prunckun

Entrepreneur. Australia Day Citizen of the Year for Unley. Recognised in the Top 50 Australian Startup Influencers. http://orrenprunckun.com

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