Who is the ideological leader/founder of of Oceana's values system?

In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Big Brother is presented as the ideological leader and symbolic founder of Oceania’s ruling system. He represents the Party’s absolute authority and its official values.

Big Brother’s image appears throughout Oceania in slogans such as “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.” The regime uses his supposed leadership to justify surveillance, obedience, perpetual war, and the suppression of independent thought. Citizens are expected to love him as both a political ruler and a paternal figure.

A major source of confusion is Emmanuel Goldstein. Goldstein is the alleged leader of the Brotherhood, the underground opposition movement, and serves as the Party’s official enemy. O’Brien is a senior Party member who helps manipulate Winston, while “Little Brother” is not the regime’s ideological founder. Big Brother, by contrast, is the central figure of the state’s propaganda.

Orwell deliberately leaves Big Brother’s literal existence uncertain. He may be a real individual, a constructed public persona, or a collective symbol. That uncertainty strengthens the novel’s point: the Party’s power does not depend on a verifiable human ruler, only on the population’s enforced belief in one.