Their Hurry Infected Them

Repentance, depicted in a 15th cent Russian Orthodox painting, possibly from a Siberian cathedral, featuring Jonah and the Whale (from tweet by Rabih A.)

In The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin talks a lot about the corrupting effects of money.  When he walks in the city, he notices that the chase for money makes people anxious and guilty.

They all looked, to him, anxious. He had often seen that anxiety before in the faces of Urrasti, and wondered about it. Was it because, no matter how much money they had, they always had to worry about making more, lest they die poor? Was it guilt, because no matter how little money they had, there was always somebody who had less? Whatever the cause, it gave all the faces a certain sameness, and he felt very much alone among them.

While he wants to find some good people to talk to in the city, perhaps some unwealthy people, he's unable to.  

He had vaguely imagined wandering about the city and getting into conversation with people, members of the unpropertied class, if there still was such a thing, or the working classes, as they called them. But all these people hurried along, on business, wanting no idle talk, no waste of their valuable time. Their hurry infected him.

It's like anxiety, worry are first-order effects of capitalism.  But there are second-order effects, too, like "sameness" and "hurry."  It affects/infects them.  It dulls them.

The dulling is a kind of imprisoning.  The pursuit of needing money, wanting more money pursues them.  And the possessions possess them.  The main character contrasts the Anares world with his world saying that people on his world have happier, spirit-filled faces.  

"We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels, there you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit. Because our men and women are free—possessing nothing, they are free. And you the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes—the wall, the wall!"